Middle School Is Worse Than Meatloaf: A Year Told Through Stuff by Jennifer L. Holm

Anyone who has sorted through the bits and pieces of another person's life--the bedside table of a son or daughter who has moved on to college or marriage, the purse, pockets, or picture albums of someone who has passed away--knows the poignancy that the little things of a person's life can hold and the stories that they tell.

In her Newbery Award and Honor Books Our Only May Amelia and Penny from Heaven, Jennifer Holm has proven that she can craft a linear narrative novel with the best of them. In her new book Middle School Is Worse Than Meatloaf: A Year Told Through Stuff she combines elements of scrapbooking and the graphic novel to tell the story of Ginny Davis' seventh-grade year. Related solely through full-page collages of to-do lists, instant messages, schoolwork, grade cards, notes from her mom, teachers, and friends, bank statements and retail receipts, and all of the flotsam and jetsam of daily life, Ginny emerges as a believable seventh grader who meets life head-on, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, and sometimes fighting to a draw.

Ginny's Big To-Do List!!!

1. Get a dad
2. Get the role of the Sugarplum Fairy in the Nutcracker
3. Look good in the school photo for once!!!
4. Do something with hair to make nose look smaller!! Color?? Perm??
5. Win something. Anything!
6. Try to be friendly with Mary Catherine Kelly.
7. Get pink sweater back!
8. Convince Mom to let me go see Grampa Joe over Easter Break.
9. Get Henry to chill out.
10. Ignore horoscopes whenever possible.

Some of Ginny's paper trail are funny-sad in the way that early adolescent events can be. Working on doing "something with hair to make nose look smaller," we see a drugstore bill for "Strawberry Cream" haircolor juxtaposed to a hair salon bill for "Haircolor restoration: red to blonde" and "Haircut and Style (remove burnt ends)," followed by the To-Do List with item 4 crossed out. We see a diary entry which begins with a poetic description of the promise of a newly waxed and painted school:

"There's nothing like the first day of school, you think."

And ends with

"And then Brian Bukvic shouts, "Hey, Banana Nose!" and you know you are back in school.

In an early English paper Ginny tells how her father was killed in a meaningless accident when she was very young. A later newspaper clipping describes her mom's remarriage to a guy named Bob, attended by Ginny in a dress of her favorite lemon yellow and her little brother in a tuxedo and his beloved red cape. A series of police blotter articles report ever-worsening vandalism and petty theft which culminate in her brother Henry's arrest for stealing his stepdad's car and burglarizing a local business. An appointment card for a family session with psychotherapist follows a discipline slip for Ginny for hitting her ballet rival Mary Catherine Kelly after she called Henry a jailbird.

It is a year in the life for Ginny--losing the lead in the Nutcracker but winning the Science Fair, breaking her arm and getting braces before the big dance and still being asked to the Spring Fling by Brian Bukvic, a year made up of trivia and tragedy and some personal triumph with which readers can readily identify.

Holm's one-of-a-kind narrative format and unique artwork by Elicia Castaldi and Matt Holm (the author's brother) work together seamlessly to make this a middle school story that middle school kids will feel right at home in.