Love Me, Love Me Not: Flipped by Wendelen Van Draanen

Famous with middle readers for her excellent Sammy Keyes detective series, Wendelin Van Draanen has boldly gone where she's never gone before--into the even scarier world of middle school romance.

In Flipped Van Draanen has created two characters, Bryce Loski and Julianna Baker, who tell their stories in alternating chapters, parallel narratives which prove the eternal verity that males and females do not see the same situations in the same way. Julianna is instantly enamored of Bruce even as he moves in across the street in the summer before second grade.

The first day I met Bryce Lofski, I flipped! Honestly, one look at him and I became a lunatic. It's his eyes. Something in his eyes. They're blue, and framed in the blackness of his lashes, they're dazzling. Absolutely breathtaking.

While Juli flips over him at first sight, Bryce sees Julia only as an annoying, eternally chattering, and pushy girl, whose constant shadowing at school and home force him to hide out in his closet or in the bathroom to avoid her attentions.

"All I've ever wanted is for Juli Baker to leave me alone. For her to back off-you know, give me some space.

She didn't just barge into my life. She barged and shoved and wedged her way into my life. Did we invite her to get into our moving van and start climbing all over boxes? No! But that's exactly what she did, taking over and showing off like only Juli Baker can."

As the years go by, Juli's approach becomes more subtle, but with no more success. An unabashedly enthusiastic student, to Bryce's eyes Juli is totally uncool. She takes over the fifth-grade science fair with the spectacle of her hatching chicks and then, to the disconcertment of Bryce's image-conscious mother, raises the chicks in a backyard coop and gives the Loskis unwanted eggs weekly from her grown-up hens. In eighth grade she climbs to the top of a huge sycamore tree and sits there staring at the horizon like a weirdo for hours, and then, when the lot owner sends a crew to cut the tree down, stages an embarrassing sit-in to save the doomed tree.

To add to the problem, Bryce hears his family making snide remarks about her family's shabby house and rundown old cars. When Bryce gets an eyefull of Juli's scruffy backyard, bare of grass and littered with chicken droppings from her hens, he begins to slip her gifts of fresh eggs into the trash to save his family, he rationalizes, from potential salmonella. When Juli discovers his ruse, Bryce tries to explain that his parents are wary of the eggs because of the woeful condition of her house and yard.

Juli is deeply hurt. When she confronts her parents about their shabby property, she learns that much of her family's money is going to keep her retarded uncle in a comfortable group home. Undaunted, Juli vows to redo the yard herself. When she begins by trimming the overgrown shrubs, Bryce's grandfather pitches in to help, and as they fence and seed the lawn, Juli gains a new view of Bryce's tense home situation.

Bryce, too, learns from his grandfather about Juli's family secret. Just as he begins to see Juli in a new light, however, she overhears a conversation in which Bryce and his friend discuss her "retard" uncle and comes to feel that Bryce is impossibly shallow. Things seem to be at an impasse for the two, with their feelings for each other flipped: Juli is hurt and angry with Bryce, while Bryce is suddenly overwhelmed with his new attraction to Juli.

Things come to a head when Bryce is chosen as one of twenty "basket boys," to be raffled off to the girls for a picnic lunch to raise money for their school. When Juli bids her "egg money" on a quiet shy boy for whom she feel sympathy, Bryce realizes that Juli is the girl for him. But when she refuses to speak to him, he takes his grandfather's advice and hopefully plants a young sycamore in her front yard. This time Juli realizes that maybe it's "time to meet Bryce in the proper light."

A sweet, family-centered story, Flipped is as fresh as first love. Van Draanen's telling of the story in alternating chapters from each character's first-person point of view reveals surprising insights into boy-girl relationships. Her characters grow and change and their relationship evolves, as all relationships must, over time. Readers will flip over this sensitive story of early love.