Girls and Math: the Novel: Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra by Wendy Lichtman

The main character of Wendy Lichtman's new mystery for middle schoolers, Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra, seems to have taken the message of Danica McKellar's new book, Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math, (reviewed here September 24) seriously. Unlike her best friends Sammy and Miranda, Tess loves algebra and finds that its concepts often apply to her daily life:

"In math, if a number is > or < another one, that never changes. But with people, that is not the way it works.

We're spending a lot of time studying inequalities in algebra now, which makes sense, since who you're greater than (>) and who you're less than (<) is kind of the point of eighth grade. So when I finished putting more paper in the top tray, I stepped aside and said "Go ahead" because we both knew that Richard was > me (R>T).

While making copies of her school newsletter, Tess finds herself in a sticky situation when mega-popular Richard asks her to let him photocopy a sheet which he tries to conceal from her. Tess knows she's not supposed to let anyone else use the copier, but Richard's charm and good looks make it hard to turn him down. But as she pretends to fill the stapler, she sees that Richard's master copy looks like an important test set for the next day in social studies. If Tess tells her teacher that Richard copied the test, will that change the situation to T>R? Or will it turn out T < Everyone at middle school?

Still stewing over what to do about the test, Tess arrives home to find her mother very upset. An artist with whom she works has found his wife dead in the garage of carbon monoxide poisoning from the still-running car, and his disconnected comments seem incriminating. But still, Tess's mom doesn't think her friend is guilty and is hesitant to talk to the police. Tess breaks her promise to her mother to stay quiet about the situation and asks her best friends and a teacher at school for advice about what to do. The girls even find a way to sneak a look at the garage where the supposed suicide occurred and talk to the artist, who seems more relieved than grieved over his wife's death.

Tess's ethical dilemmas grow after Richard and two of his best friends unexpectedly get perfect scores on the big social studies test. Tess notices that the three boys have the same intricate hand-drawn fake tattoo circling their wrists and determines that these must be a code for the test answers.

As she works her way through these serious real-world problems, Tess uses math concepts to help her think her way through her perplexities, doodling Venn diagrams, parallel lines, infinity and imaginary number symbols in her notebook and utilizing the Additive Property of Equality and axioms and theorems to arrive at her best way to find solutions in her own life. As Tess explains the infinity symbol to her math-challenged mother as a character which means "always changing forever," her mom replies, "Maybe that is the real lesson of algebra, Honey, that everything changes."

Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra is a first-rate middle school novel which manages to blend mathematical concepts into a fast-moving teen mystery. The author ably sums up the book's theme: "[For] a teen realizing that some questions have more than one right answer, algebra, with its unknowns and variables seemed a perfect metaphor." Danica McKellar would agree!