Keeping Friends: The Hard Kind of Promise by Gina Willner-Pardo

Sarah Franklin had been best friends with Marjorie Fingerhut for eight years. She couldn't imagine life without Marjorie.

They had met in preschool, when Marjorie told everyone at show-and-tell that she was a leprechaun. But it was in kindergarten, when they were five, that Sarah had really come to understand how it really was with her and Marjorie. They were coloring at the Fingerhut's kitchen table.

"We should be best friends forever," Marjorie had said.

Now, remembering that afternoon filled Sarah with a longing that was both piercing and inexplicable, and a little bit like dread.

But seventh grade changes everything, everyone says. Marjorie was still her best friend, the friend who just knew how she felt about things without having to be told, the friend who always accepted everything about her, who never argued with her.

Marjorie hadn't changed. The thing was, everything else had. Suddenly there were rules that you had to follow, rules that suddenly Sarah just knew, like how to dress like the cool people, and which boys were cute, and which people to stay away from because their weirdness was, like, catching, somehow. But Marjorie didn't get the rules, or if she did, she didn't care. She still wore tee shirts with cartoon characters and ate embarrassingly smelly peanut butter and potato chip sandwiches out of embarrassing grocery sacks at lunch, and was increasingly absorbed with the embarrassingly geeky film production class kids. Then, at the ballroom dance class's Cotillion, she shows up in an elaborate Victorian outfit with a huge hat, and high-buttoned shoes. "I love to dress up," she says, unconcernedly, seemingly oblivious that everyone is whispering about her weird clothes, about how strange she is
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Sarah wants to be a loyal friend, trying to include Marjorie in a lunch group with her new chorus class friends, Carly and Lizzy, and even agreeing to be a green alien in her film project for class. But when the shooting date for the film conflicts with Sarah's required Saturday rehearsals for the annual choral competition, Sarah has to choose between her promise to Marjorie and her membership in the choir, and she suddenly realizes that she really loves, not just being with her new friends there, but the actual making of music. Singing really matters to her.

Gina Willner-Pardo's The Hard Kind of Promise (Houghton Mifflin Clarion), deals honestly with the pain of separation, the inevitable growing apart of childhood friends that adolescence sometimes brings. As Sarah begins to find who she really is, forming new bonds with her choir buddies on their successful competition in San Francisco, she also begins to see that her choice of music is no different from Marjorie's love for film making: they just have different passions which will take them in different directions and which change their friendship in ways they cannot yet know.

Sarah knew it was a lie to try to pretend that nothing was different, nothing had changed. Sarah knew it, and she knew Marjorie knew it, too. Marjorie always knew.

"I don't get why this happened," Sarah whispered.

"Maybe it's just supposed to happen. Like getting taller," Marjorie said. "Only no one told us."

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.

Managing Middle School: Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree by Lauren Tarshis

In Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree, we meet a seventh-grade heroine who attempts to deal with the messy emotional morass of middle school with total rationality and detachment. Emma-Jean is a girl doesn't even allow the familiarity of contractions into her conversations with her classmates.

Despite her desire to observe middle school interaction from her solitary lunch table, however, Emma-Jean's basic goodness draws her into the crazy stew of adolescent social scheming when she encounters Colleen Pomerantz boo-hooing massively in the girl's room. Colleen is the exact opposite of Emma-Jean, a kind-hearted girl who takes everything with massive emotionality, and as Emma-Jean plods rationally into an attempt to solve Colleen's problem, she walks right into the swamp of adolescent mores.

Emma-Jean comes to recognize the irrationality and unpredictability of human feelings as her efforts to solve everyone's problems have unforeseen consequences. The rigid and solitary path through life which she has created to shield herself from grief and pain gives way to the richer struggle to accept human relationships with all of their surprises.

This is a rich, rewarding, funny, and moving story of one girl's transition through the "middle passage" of middle school. With this first novel, Lauren Tarshis hits one out of the ball park!

As I watched Emma-Jean study her classmates with dispassionate objectivity, I couldn't help remembering another heroine who tried a similar protocol, Harriet, in Louise Fitzhugh's 1960's classic, Harriet the Spy. Less good-hearted than Emma-Jean, but just as clinical, Harriet keeps her observations of her classmates safe in a secret notebook, until the day she loses it and her schoolmates discover her critical thoughts about them. Finding a place within life's absurdities without losing oneself therein is a common thread in both novels.

For the pragmatic early adolescent, nonfiction offers some help in making the transition. For late elementary students who need a primer on intermediate and middle school mores, here's a book which my granddaughter found helpful in calming the anxieties of entering that new scene: A Smart Girl's Guide to Starting Middle School, by Julie Williams and Angela Martini. For a book which goes beyond the girl scene and includes boys and (gulp!) some down-to-earth thoughts about sex, see Arlene Erlbach's The Middle School Survival Guide.

If you have a child nearing the "wonder years," (as in "I wonder how I'll survive all this!") any of the books above may help!