Roll Video: Reel Life Starring Us by Lisa Greenwald

I'm standing in the second-floor bathroom shaking crunched-up potato chips from the bottom of my backpack.

This whole starting-a-new-school thing would be easier if I had a removable tattoo on my forehead or something, just so people would know I was cool in my old school. Really, I was.  Everyone was artsy in his or her own way. And it wasn't cliquey. I was cool. People liked me.

"Chipped already?" the girl at the sink asks me. "On your first day?"

"So, it's, like, a thing?" I asked. "I don't get it."

"You were chipped," she said. "Someone saw you and decided that you were a good target."

It was the job opportunity of a lifetime for both of Dina Gross's parents to move from their home in the Berkshires to Long Island. For Dina it's like moving to a new planet. Rockwood Hills Middle School is big, and the kids are cliquish. There are the custom-jeans-wearing queens and kings of the popular crowd, led by the biggest queen bee of all, Chelsea Stern, and her followers Kendall and Molly.  Then there's everyone else.  And  there's that strange custom of being "chipped," a stealthy and seemingly random "thing" that seems to happen to anyone who seems slightly different.

But Dina and Chelsea have one thing in common--both are entering a month late--Dina, because of the move and Chelsea because she's been out with mono. Their social studies class is already divided into groups working on major projects to be presented at the school's fiftieth anniversary celebration, and Mr. Valakis makes them a group of two and pointedly warns them to get busy catching up.

Dina sees a way to use her favorite hobby--video filmmaking--and she already has the skills and lingo from her old school's film class. Chelsea thinks going around sticking a camera in people's faces is embarrassingly lame, but she has her own problems, a secret she can't share with her even her best friends. Her dad has lost his high-paying job, and she's struggling to hide her limited budget from her shopping-crazed BFFs, and Chelsea knows that she's close to dropping into the masses of non-popular, frequently chipped kids at school. Reluctantly, she decides she has no choice but to go along with Dina's adventurous plan to include Sasha Preston, teen TV star and the best-known alum of Rockwood Hills Middle in their film, a daring plan in which the two would-be filmmakers find themselves pretending to be extras on location for Sasha's show in New York while Dina tries to talk their way into a video interview with the star.

Both girls discover that things are not always what they seem in the process of filming their classmates. Sasha Preston's powerful remembrances of the superficialities of her old middle school help them to see their social scene in a different way. As Dina tells Chelsea after their video's premier,

"You're going to say I'm a video nerd for saying this, but I'm going to say it anyway," Dina starts.

"Sometimes in order to really see things, you just have to look through a different lens."

"I don't think you're a video nerd," I say.

"I think you're right."

And I really, really mean that.

Both Chelsea and Dina see themselves and their classmates through a different lens in Lisa Greenwald's Reel Life Starring Us (Amulet Books/Abrams), a  young adult novel that takes a closeup shot of middle-school society through the alternating narratives of its two main characters. "This funny, nuanced tale offers keen observations on middle-school life," says Kirkus Reviews.

Greenwald's other popular 'tween books include My Life in Pink & Green, My Summer of Pink & Green, and Sweet Treats & Secret Crushes.

Work In Progress: Middle School--Get Me Out of Here! by James Patterson

MOM THROWS A CURVEBALL

The next morning Mom made really good French toast for breakfast. With bananas and maple syrup. and extra cinnamon on mine.

"Rafe, when you're done, I want you to put on the shirt I left out for you," Mom said. "And clean pants, please."

That stopped me with a mouthful of everything. Nothing good ever happens in clothes your mom picks out for you.

As far as Rafe Khatchadorian is concerned life has already thrown him a sinker. Just as he thought he was at least on first base with a scholarship seventh grade year at Airbrook Art Academy, a grease-fire-cum-conflagration at Swifty's Diner puts the kabosh on mom's waitress job, and the whole family is forced to move in with Grandma Dotty, who is (a bit dotty, that is) in the city, facing seventh grade in an inner-city middle school.

But Rafe's former teacher Mrs. Donatello (nee Dragon Lady) comes through again and wangles him a slot at Cathedral School of the Arts. Tuition is free, and so, thinks Rafe, is he--free of those state-of-the-art middle school bullies back home.

But Rafe reckons without regard to real life. Mean kids, he discovers, are part of the package even in art school, and when his first project, a self-portrait, is up for a crit, (critique) by the whole class, Rafe is subject to a brutal dinking, led by the resident well-heeled popular kid Zeke McDonald with his henchman Kenny Patel, sending Rafe into a self-esteem tailspin and permanent lunch periods in a stall in the boys' bathroom.

"To be honest, Mr. Beekman," says Kenny, "I don't think Rafe's portrait tells us very much, except what he looks like." Kenny turned around and looked back at me like there was a pile of doggy droppings on the chair. "Well... maybe not even that," he said, and a bunch of people laughed.

But in his new power lunch place, Rafe is discovered by another of Zeke's victims, Matty the Freak, and the two decide to bond in a bit of sweet revenge, bombing Zeke and Kenny with water-filled rubber gloves from the roof as the two meanies eat lunch on the outside steps. A friend and fellow conspirator is good, but soon the impulsive Rafe is drawn into a series of hilarious but art-career-threatening misadventures with Matty. Advised by his teacher that good art grows out of the artist's life, Rafe comes up with another grand Plan, his OPERATION GET A LIFE! Some of his self-imposed tasks are innocuous, such as walking backward around the block; some of them, dumpster-diving with Matty, result in cool found objects for his Scrap Sculpture project; one, a surveillance project to discover more about his missing father from the mysterious Hairy the barber, uncovers a family link, but as Matty the Freak continues to up the ante on the Operation, things get more than a little hairy for our hero. In-school suspension follows the kidnap-Zeke-and Kenny's-Scrap-Project Caper, and then Zeke exacts total cyber revenge when time for the crit for their digital arts project rolls around.

"Okay, Rafe, let's see what you have for us," Mr. Crawley said. "What's the name of your project?"

"Kid in Wall," I said. (What can I say. Titles just aren't my thing.)

Mr. Crawley punched a couple of keys. But instead of Kid in A Wall...

The whole computer lab went totally quiet. Nobody laughed. I don't even think anybody breathed.

After that, I couldn't tell you, because I'd already walked out of the room.

Totally humiliated by the revelation of his anxiety about his missing father in a swiped drawing captioned "I don't think he's coming back," Rafe takes flight, heading for his former hometown, Hills Valley, on a smelly bus, with vague plans to begin a hermit's life in the family's rented storage locker, a total loser at art and life.

In this non-stop sequel to their best-selling Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life, authors James Patterson's and Chris Tebbett's latest middle-school saga, Middle School: Get Me out of Here! (Little, Brown, 2012) ranges between the heights of hilarity and the pits of pathos as his hero Rafe Khachadorian careens through yet another middle school year. Illustrated by the talented and sensitive Laura Parks' comic cartoon drawings of Rafe's escapades in near graphic-novel style, this latest book is one all middle schoolers (and former middle schoolers of all ages) will find a really fine read, a humorous but fine-tuned story that tickles the funny bone and touches the heart.