Spring Fever: Emma-Jean Lazurus Fell In Love by Lauren Tarshis

"It is clear that Will is not suitable for me in any way," Emma-Jean said. "And yet I find myself thinking about him even when I want to be thinking about other things."

Indeed she could not recall a single fact from her classes that day. She had concluded, however that the arrangement of freckles on Will's forearm closely resembled the constellation Virgo.

"Could it be," Emma-Jean asked, her tone grave, "that I am suffering from spring fever? A crush?"

That anomaly, a middle-school girl who tries to approach life with total rationality, the doggedly logical heroine of Lauren Tarshis' hit first novel, Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree, (reviewed here in my post of February 10, 2007) to her total surprise finds herself in the throes of a crush on Will Keeler, indifferent student, star basketball player, but, even to the sensible-minded Emma-Jean, irresistibly cute! To make matters worse, the Spring Fling is coming up, and her best friends seem even more twitter-pated than usual, talking of little except the boys they want to ask to the dance.

Only Colleen is without a crush, or so it seems, until a mysterious note appears in her locker one day:

COLLEEN-

I THINK YOU'RE THE BEST GIRL IN THE WHOLE GRADE.

I HOPE YOU WANT TO GO TO THE SPRING FLING.

LOVE,
SOMEONE WHO THINKS YOU'RE SO GREAT!

Colleen is transformed by the amazing thought that some boy actually likes her, and buoyed by this knowledge, commandeers Emma-Jean to sleuth out the writer of the note so that she can ask him to the dance. Emma-Jean readily agrees, and examining the note with her father's magnifying glass, determines that the writer must be one of the nine left-handed boys in her seventh-grade class. But when Emma-Jean's surveillance uncovers the real person behind the note, her crush on Will takes on a new and conflicting significance.

Fans of Tarshis' refreshingly insightful and truly funny first novel will love Emma-Jean's second adventure into the "messy" world of middle-school mores, Emma Jean Lazarus Fell in Love, in which she experiences both the startling twinges of first love and a new appreciation of the pivotal importance of the loyalty she shares with her best friends.