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.

Power Failure for the Pretty Committee: Sealed with a Diss: A Clique Novel by Lisi Harrison

Lisi Harrison's latest in the soap-opera serial of the seriously rich , Sealed with a Diss, (The Clique series, #8) is out, and for a change this novel doesn't close with the Pretty Committee and its alpha leader Massie Brock sleekly congratulating themselves for proving, once again, their superiority over the Losers Beyond Repair at Octavian Country Day School.

The story begins with one of those "willing suspension of disbelief" moments when we learn that deep in the sub-cellar of OCD is a secret hangout for the alpha alphas of Octavian students, the DSL Daters, eighth-grade queen bees of school society. Within this control room, surrounded by an array of expensive cosmetics, Starbucks latte' machines, and high-end snacks, is the piece de resistance, a television monitor connected to a closed circuit camera planted inside the class Share Bear, transmitting every juicy moment of Briarwood School for Boys' Emotional Sensitivity Powwows.

When Massie and the PC girls finally comprehend that the key to this room is the key to the secret knowledge of Briarwood boys, their well-conditioned and subtly highlighted heads are reeling. As leader of the graduating Daters, Skye Hamilton has the power to turn this room and its promise of total dating dominance over to the Pretty Committee's leader. But the key comes at a price.

Skye's asking price is that all members of the Committee must attend her end-of-school couple costume party with all-HART (Hawt (hot), Alpha, Rich, Toned) dates--AND that Massie deliver as Sky's date for the evening the ultra-cool ninth-grader Chris Abeley. Massie makes the gutsy deal, and swings an agreement that the Committee take over the room immediately, and ah-mazingly, Skye agrees.

What follows is a mad mishmash of machinations and manipulations as Massie pushes her clique into finding the hawtest of dates for Skye's party and manages to line up Chris as well, with the complication that Chris seems to be more interested in her than in Skye and her soiree'. With their whole final year at OCD at stake, it's a anxiety-provoking three weeks that would take the glitter out of anyone's Glossip Girl Lip Gloss. But things get worse when Massie and Claire hear their own "safe" boyfriends Derrington and Cam saying some dubious things about them in their closed circuit confession sessions. Then, when the camera in the Share Bear goes on the fritz, the Pretty Committee has to call on their sometime enemy Layne Abeley, with her trusty drill and circuit testers, as their techie accomplice in a late-night raid on Briarwood School to restore their reception of the boys' ESP sessions.

Things come to a huge meltdown at Skye's party. Cam and Derrington dump Claire and Massie, Dylan is dissed by her duo of dates, and Skye ditches Chris for a surfer dude. The only consolation is that Skye stands by her deal for the secret room, which allows Massie to keep her alpha status intact despite the breakup debacle at the party.

But, ehmagawd, that's not all! It seems Layne's less than expert drilling around inside the ceiling of Briarwood's ESP classroom has done a bit of injury to the infrastructure, resulting in the collapse of the Briarwood surfers' wave pool and the ruination of the whole building. Briarwood School for Boys is essentially a wipeout, and for the foreseeable future, their hawt student body will be sharing the Octavian facility with the girls of OCD. Good news? Not for the Pretty Committee's rule at Octavian Country Day School. When the boys take over OCD by storm, Massie's group realizes that they are the new B-listers.

"Ehmagawd!" Massie gasped for air. "Do you realize it's been, like, an entire minute since anyone's even looked at us?"

"Huh?"

"It's like the boys are the new alphas!"

"Ehmagawd!" What if our ex-crushes are the new eighth-grade alphas and we're the new..." Her voice trailed.

"The new what," asked Alicia.

Massie opened her mouth, but all she heard was a collective gasp from the New Pretty Committee. No further explanation was needed.

Will the New Pretty Committee spend their entire eighth grade year as Losers Beyond Repair? I guess we'll have to wait for Clique #9, The Bratfest at Tiffany's (Clique Series). to be published February 5, 2008.

Eternal Triangle: 'Tween Novels by Lisa Yee

The summer between sixth and seventh grade isn't turning out so great for Stanford Wong and Millicent Minn. At first it's shaping up perfectly for Stanford, who has made the seventh-grade basketball A-Team and been selected to go to a prestigious summer sports camp. There's only one cloud in his summertime sky. He's failed sixth grade English! That means no b-ball camp and no A-Team unless he passes Mr. Glick's summer school English class. It looks like a bummer summer when Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time.

Enter Millicent Minn, Girl Genius. Millie is a child prodigy, not yet twelve and due to begin her senior year in high school. Her summer plans include her first course at the local college. To Millie's dismay, her mom, who is worried about her lack of friends, signs her up for, of all things, a volleyball team. Because their grandmothers are best friends, Stanford's occasionally dotty grandmother Yin-Yin persuades Millicent's grandmother that Millie is the perfect English tutor for Stanford. Now Millie has to put up with bonehead Stanford all summer. She is also dreadful at volleyball, and practice is a constant embarrassment until a teammate, Emily Ebers, approaches her sympathetically and Millie finds herself, for the first time in her life, with a best friend. The only problem is that she can't let Emily discover that she's a fairly famous girl genius, or the friendship may be ruined!

More complications arise when Stanford seems to be on the way to becoming Emily's boyfriend! Stanford and Millicent become allies when they cooperate in making Emily think Stanford is tutoring Millie rather than the other way around. Both Stanford and Millie know that they must tell Emily the truth sometime--but each keeps putting off the fateful moment.

Meanwhile, family complications keep Millie worried about her mother's strange sickness and her grandmother's impending move to London. Stanford watches his much-loved grandmother forced to move to a residential home and tries not to think about his parents' quarrels over his father's heavy work schedule. Millicent dutifully tutors the resistant Stanford, who finally begins to knuckle down to pass his English class so that he can start the year as a seventh grade basketball phenom instead of a repeating sixth-grade loser.

Things come to a head when Emily accidentally finds out that both Millie and Stanford have been deceiving her and breaks off with both of them. Millie is devastated and Stanford is at a loss about what to do until Millie finally screws up the courage to tell Emily that she wants to be friends again. Good-hearted Emily forgives Millie and Stanford and the three are, for the first time, all friends with each other.

The wonderfully cool thing about this typical 'tween story is that it is told in two separate books. While Stanford Wong is dealing with keeping his basketball buddies from finding out he's going to summer school, genius Millicent Min is discovering that her college "friend" is really stringing her along for the free homework help. Each character confides in and worries about changes in his or her relationship with a beloved grandmother. Stanford's father is more and more the absent parent as he competes for a promotion at work, and Millicent's under-employed father fakes a successful job search out of embarrassment, while Millie's mother's mysterious "sickness" turns out to be a surprise pregnancy. Author Lisa Yee manages to keep both balls (volleyball and basketball, in this case) in the air as she gives each character a unique and highly appealing voice in these two engaging novels.

And, as a bonus, Yee scores a three-pointer with her new book, So Totally Emily Ebers, in which Emily tells her side of the three-way story of Millicent's and Stanford's summer. Kind-hearted and accepting as a friend, Emily, too, has her family problems. Her mom, a well-known journalist, has moved from the East to the West Coast following an unhappy divorce. Emily adores her father and is somewhat angry with her mother for ending the marriage, and although she has better social skills than Millie, she perhaps needs their friendship even more.

This is a skillfully written trilogy of novels which give middle schoolers a chance to see the same situations from the honest points of view of three very different but very appealing characters. Lisa Yee, who won the Sid Fleischman Award for Humor for Millicent Minn, Girl Genius is an author to watch!