Somebody Loves Me? The Candy Smash by Jacqueline Davies

Evan looked over at Jessie's desk. Lined up in neat rows were four perfect paper spirals, four curly paper rosettes, and twenty identical paper hearts... so precise they looked like they came from a factory.

It was a times like this that Evan wished his little sister wasn't in the same fourth-grade class with him.

Jessie was good at math and writing and science and just about everything that counted in school. She had even skipped the third grade. Why did she have to be so smart?

But despite her precocious abilities, Jessie is only eight years old, so when the love bug bites in Mrs. Overton's fourth grade class, Jessie just doesn't get it. To her meticulous, scientific mind, it is a mystery to be solved empirically. And since the February issue of her newspaper, The 4-0 Forum, is due soon, she decides that a survey of what her classmates think about love, complete with statistical pie graphs, is the way to explain the unexplainable.

Like, why is someone leaving everyone in the class personalized boxes of candy hearts? Why is her best friend Megan Moriarty acting strange, bawling in the girls' bathroom and refusing to tell Jessie all about it? When she finds his poem "Pony Girl" while emptying his trash and publishes it on the front page of the Forum, why is her brother Evan angry instead of pleased? And why is Mrs. Overton confiscating all her copies of the Forum and talking about violations of "privacy?"

Why is everyone in the class mad at her when her statistics are perfectly valid?

In this fourth book in her best-selling The Lemonade War series, Davies continues to document with humor and insight the differences between the empirical Jessie and her intuitive brother Evan. Evan finds himself inexplicably under the spell of the pony-tailed Megan Moriarity, getting that special zing from Mrs. Overton's poetry lessons, and writing his own poetry using his newly learned skills. Jessie, as yet un-stricken with Cupid's early arrows, doesn't understand why everyone's crushes are embarrassing secrets, but she's sure that documenting everyone's experiences will uncover the truth, even when she discovers to her surprise that she is the object of a mysterious someone's crush, too. Jessie, of course, is clueless, but readers will spot her admirer right away, in this excellent sequel in Davies' outstanding series for elementary readers.

Growing up, especially discovering the strange ways of the human heart, is hard to do, but in the hands of a terrific writer like Davies, who mixes sadness, humor, and love perfectly, The Candy Smash (The Lemonade War Series) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) is a perfect February read-aloud novel, combining a great middle grade fiction outing with built-in poetry lessons for a blend of Valentine's Day-Poetry Month topicality. Davies appends the full text of Jessie's censored newspaper along with her own glossary of poetry terms and the full texts of poems--from Emily Dickinson through E.E. Cummings and on to Sylvia Plath--referenced in the plot. This series, like Beverly Cleary's Ramona Quimby series, takes the reader along with the growing experiences of memorable characters in realistic family, friendship, and school experiences. Not to be missed!

Separation Anxiety: Jake and Lily by Jerry Spinelli

This is a story about me, Lily.

And me, Jake.

We're twins and we're exactly alike.

Not exactly!

Whatever. This is a book we wrote about the summer we turned eleven and Jake ditched me.

Jake and Lily are fraternal twins, boy and girl, true, but close in a way that only twins can be. They only discover how close they are when, on their sixth birthday, they both awake from identical sleepwalking dreams of their birth:

And when we awoke that night hand in hand at the train station, and it's like the rest of us was finally born. We knew. At last we knew.

It's like a beautiful present had been sitting there for six years and we never noticed it and then finally we did and we tore it open, and... wow! the present was us.

We knew that not everybody can hear their brother from five miles away. We knew that not everybody yells, "I'm stuck!" when it's happening to somebody else.

What an amazing night, the night we unwrapped ourselves.

Jake and Lily discover that they can read each other's thoughts and emotions, that they can communicate silently, across any distance, and sense each other's emotions. Lily christens their special power "goombla." Sure, they're not mirror images, like identical twins. Lily is hot-headed and impetuous, and Jake is more contemplative and slow to speak and act, but they know each other in a unique way. For ten years this closeness makes them want to do everything together, to keep that special feeling of oneness going.

But then, as their eleventh year approaches, that poignant year that is the best of childhood and the end of childhood, things suddenly change. Jake doesn't want to ride bikes with Lily: he wants to ride around with a group of guys who call themselves "the Posse" and spend time looking for nerdy kids ("goobers") to tease and ridicule. Lily suddenly feels torn from part of herself, and she casts about futilely for a way to regain that lost closeness.

Lilly turns to her grandfather, a self-proclaimed "old hippie" who knows since the death of his wife what it means to lose a part of yourself. He tries to counsel Lily, telling her she has to find the "Just Lily" part of her real self and suggests she find an interest that she doesn't share with Jake, a hobby or another friend. Lily's first tries at defining herself are failures, and for the first time she experiences what it means to feel alone and lonely.

Meanwhile, Jake's guy fun begins to pale, as the gang settles upon one "goober," a new kid in the neighborhood--Ernest, a super smart, super-dorky type whose guileless gratitude for what he construes as the gang's "friendship" keeps their loutish leader, The Bumpster, in stitches as he leads his cohorts into tormenting Ernie, vandalizing his tottering clubhouse over and over as Ernie patiently rebuilds. Jake likes the burping contests, the junk-food binges in their "hideout," and riding around town looking cool that goes with membership in the Posse, but he realizes that he's actually beginning to like and respect the off-beat Ernie, and his guilt at their bullying begins to separate him from his buddies. Lily also feels herself changing. Suddenly she meets a new girl and they fall into an easy, empathetic friendship that mirrors the one she's known with her brother.

Is this the end of her special goombla with Jake? Does this summer mean there is no special relationship in the future for the twins?

It's not easy to write absorbing psychological fiction for elementary readers, but as his top-selling, Newbery-winning Maniac Magee proves, Jerry Spinelli is a master of his craft, taking us inside his character's minds while spinning out fast-paced middle reader action with the best of them. In his latest, Jake and Lily (HarperCollins, 2012) Spinelli uses alternating chapters to tell Jake and Lily's story of that definitive summer in their own voices, a summer which leaves them with a new sense of self and a new understanding for the other as well.

Says Publishers Weekly, "Spinelli adroitly balances emotional tension with introspective moments in this smart and funny story about a pair of twins growing apart."

Different! The Bell Bandit by Jacqueline Davies

Everything about this trip to Grandma's house was different.

For Jessie, Christmas and New Year's are supposed to be the same each year, a trip to Grandma's farmhouse and ringing Grandma's old bell on Lowell Hill at midnight on New Year's.

But this year, even the trip itself is different. Because of a fire started when Grandma left a kettle on the stove and an arm broken when she ran for help, Jessie and Evan had to stay home for Christmas and drive up to take care of Grandma when she is discharged from the hospital just before New Year's Eve. Evan won't sit in the backseat with Jessie and play their usual car games, but instead is lost in his mp3 player in the front seat. Grandma's house has huge holes burned in the kitchen wall and upstairs bedroom; the antique bell is gone from its scaffold on the top of the hill; and Grandma herself can't seem to remember who Evan and Jessie are and which decade she's living in.

In the kitchen, Jessie's mom was trying to take Grandma's coat off, but Grandma kept twisting away, saying it was time to feed the chickens.

Chickens! But Jessie knew that Grandma didn't keep chickens anymore, not since Jessie was just a little kid.

"I'll feed the chickens, Mrs. Joyce." said Evan. Why was Evan calling Grandma "Mrs. Joyce"?

"You don't know how!" said Grandma, angrily. "Susan, stop it!" She swatted at Jessie's mom and twisted away. "I have chores to do!"

"Yes, I do," said Evan. "I used to feed the chickens for you all the time." Jessie though his voice sounded like it was being squeezed out of a toothpaste tube. "The feed is in the barn in the barrel to the left of the door."

"Did you?" Grandma looked at Evan. "Well, all right, then."

But Jessie loves a mystery, and she fixes her hopes on finding the family's missing antique bell. Somehow she feels that if it can be restored to its place and if she and Grandma can ring it together on midnight, everything will go back to the way it was. Evan is uninterested, absorbed in being the "man of the family," helping Pete, the carpenter hired to repair the fire damage. Jessie is forced to turn for help to a new neighbor, Maxwell, a very bright but very different ten-year-old, whose amazing abilities and strange personal mannerisms make her wonder if he can be any real help in putting everything back the way it is supposed to be.

Mom goes to town to keep an appointment with her mother's insurance agent, leaving Evan at home to watch Grandma, and Jessie slips off in the late afternoon to find Maxwell and try to locate the missing bell before midnight. When Grandma insists on taking a short walk outside, Evan hurries to find his parka and boots, but finds her gone when he comes outside. Calling and searching are no good, and Evan knows he needs Jessie, the one who's good at figuring out puzzles, to help him guess where Grandma can be.

More snow begins to fall. It's growing dark, and when Evan finds Jessie, at first even she is no help. But then she remembers the sturdy tepee she and Evan built two summers ago out in the woods. Grandma had said it would last forever, and Jessie hopes that, lost and confused, Grandma may have gone there for shelter.

Things change, and not always for the better, and in the third book in her heralded Lemonade War Series, the just published The Bell Bandit (The Lemonade War Series) (Houghton Mifflin, 2012) skillfully provides the requisite conflicts and suspense while developing a far deeper theme, how a family deals with changes that are not always for the good in their own lives. Told from the dual points of view of the sensitive older Evan and precocious eight-year-old Jessie, who matures as she learns that dealing with these differences, even Maxwell's different way of perceiving reality, takes a new kind of problem-solving for her logical mind and a new sensitivity to the puzzle that is life. With this highly readable and yet emotionally powerful novel, Davies is proving herself one of the best writers for the middle grades around.