Blindsided! A Blind Guide to Normal by Beth Vrabel

"Seriously, though, guys. Try to hold it together without me. Someone will need to keep an eye out the newbies.

"Shall I save the pupil for you?" said Alice, slicing the cake.

"Absolutely," I grinned and passed out slices of my giant farewell eyeball cake.

"I can't help it," I said. "I'm just so... I can't wait for next year, to get back to normal. Be surrounded by normal--" I bit off the stupid thing I was going to say, but it was too late. Alice's face flushed again. Man, I can be such a jerk sometimes.

It should have hit me then--being celebrated like a departing rock star. Because here's the joke for you. Where can a cocky, one-eyed ginger be the coolest cat around?

Punchline: Only at a school for the blind.

And maybe not even there, given the way he's bombed his farewell address to his classmates. With one artificial eye (Artie for short) and partial sight in the other, Richie Ryder Raymond hopes that his talent for the quick quip will see him through his transfer from Addison School for the Blind to a normal, that is, regular eighth grade class at Papuaville Middle, home of the Fighting Guinea Pigs. With a name like that, the comic possibilities seem endless.

But it doesn't begin well, as he squints his way through the halls, trying to see the room numbers and maybe spot the gorgeous girl next door.

Yep. Room 206! I guess I was being too self-congratulatory to notice the love of my life was standing beside me. I ran right into Jocelyn. She fell backward into the boy behind her.

"Hey!" "Watch where you're going!" a guy barked. "I don't think he saw me," said Jocelyn. "Of course, he saw you!" the guy said. He put his arm around her.

"No, man, I didn't!" The guy jerked his chin at me. He had brilliant green eyes and the longest eyelashes I'd ever seen on a boy. I blurted out. "Do you have to brush your eyelashes? Because they are mega, mega long!"

"You're a freak!" Lash Boy hissed as everyone laughed. "What the heck is wrong with you?"

A hand clamped down on my shoulder and Lash boy's. Oh, great. Perfect way to meet my homeroom teacher.

"I am ashamed of how you would treat a differently-abled student!" she yelled at Lash Boy.

Ryder is outed as "differently abled," and although he tries to explain what happened, his teacher tells Lash Boy (a.k.a., Jocelyn's boyfriend Max) that she's calling his parents. Ryder's hopes of slipping in under the radar are dashed, and now Max, the class golden boy, will have it in for him forever, which is not good, given that Ryder already has a crush on Jocelyn.

And that's just the beginning of his problem with being "normal." Living for the year with Gramps while his dad is doing research in Alaska is not easy. Gramps seems stuck in the 1970s, still grieving over the death of his wife at the birth of Ryder's dad. Her weird monument, a stone horse, stands in the middle of the front yard, decorated for all seasons and holidays, and his little house is decorated in stereotypical seventies style. Gramps plays disco constantly in his old Oldsmobile, and talks about Ryder's grandmother as if she's still alive. Ryder's mom must find that a bit creepy, too, because she takes to working unusually long hours to avoid being there whenever she can.

But Jocelyn lives next door, and Ryder soon learns that her little brother died in a fire and that she was rescued by Max when they were eight years old. Adding that to the fact that Max is considered a hero, a real Mr. Nice Guy at school, Ryder figures his chances with Jocelyn are dimmer than his vision.

And Ryder’s hopes of getting to normal don’t grow any brighter when he and Gramps walk into an argument outside Home Depot, where Max is fund-raising for a project for grief counseling.

Gramps and I were each downing our second hot dogs when the fight began. I heard “Max, I don’t want to talk about this!” all but screamed by Jocelyn. “I’m so sick of your nonstop gotta-help-everyone-all-the-time crap.”

“Crap?” Max said, pleading. “Come on, Jocelyn. It’s been years. Your brother would want us to keep other kids from going through what we.... His voice went thick with passion. “Just let yourself remember!”

I punched Max Waters in the face.

And then Max gets even by tripping Ryder in the cafeteria. Artie the artificial eye pops out, skitters across the floor, followed by retreating girls screeching and guys kicking it around the room. And for the punchline, at first Ryder finds that he’s got no joke, nothing.

Artie comes to rest in front of his homeroom teacher, Miss Singer, who picks it up, her pity radiating from her, and looks around for Ryder.

I slammed a big old NOPE sign on the pain stew in my gut. I reached for my eye. I climbed on top of a chair. Cupping Artie in my hand, I rubbed it on the hem of my shirt. I slowly, slowly, slowly popped the eye back into place.

Then, arms out, like this was all a huge theatrical joke, I bowed–-three times in fact.

It seems that nobody, not Gramps, or Mom and Dad, or Max and Jocelyn, nobody is really normal. They all have things they don’t want to think about. But sometimes you have to look at those things with both eyes open. In her sequel to A Blind Guide to Stinkville, the forthcoming A Blind Guide to
Normal (Sky Pony Press, 2016), Ryder finds that maybe normal is accepting a new normal that includes anger, sadness, and loss. And they’re all okay. With a moving cathartic conclusion, Vrabel fashions a coming-of-age story that middle readers will never forget.

Ryder's honest first person voice is funny, yet poignant, one that gets the reader right inside him, seeing the world through his eye. Each character has a way to hide, something inside he or she try to cover up and forget. Jocelyn has her scars hidden under long sleeves, the outward reminders of her guilt for her little brother's death, Max has his own secret of starting that fatal fire, and Ryder's parents have their own fears that his cancer might return. Gramps has his grief for his wife and the signs of her existence he can't bear to remove from his life--all things that make them different, yet make them normal human beings. Says School Library Journal, "A sweet, thoughtful, and funny read--a heartfelt tale without the typical saccharine coating."

Self-Defense: The Accused: Theodore Boone Series (Book 3) by John Grisham

Theo knew it was wrong, maybe not illegal, but certainly wrong.

The line between right and wrong had always been clear; now, though, nothing was clear. The wrongs were piling on top of him. It was wrong for someone to break into his locker and plant stolen loot with the obvious goal of getting him in trouble. It was wrong for someone to stalk him, to slash his tires and throw a rock through his window. Theo had done nothing wrong, yet was now being treated like a criminal. And if Theo were to be charged by the police, another wrong would occur. Was it wrong for Theo to steal a password, all in an effort to prevent another, much larger wrong?

Could doing something wrong lead to the right result?

Theo Boone knows that someone is out to get him. Accustomed to being on the sunny side of the law and order line, Theo Boone, kid lawyer, finds himself accused of a major felony, the forcible entry and burglary of an electronics store. When his school locker appears to have been vandalized and his favorite baseball cap stolen, Theo figures it is just part of a bully's on-going harassment. Running late, he puts off reporting the theft to the school office, and when four stolen netpads are found in his locker, the police seem certain they have the right felon.

Theo deduces that the planted goods are part of the chain of events--three slashed bike tires and a rock thrown through the window of his parents' law office, obviously meant to intimidate him--and he is certain that someone is out to exact revenge upon him and through him on his parents, but who and for what? With everything coming down on him, Theo knows that the only way he is going to escape being the defendant himself in a trial for robbery is to find the real thief first.

Theo turns to his sometime mentor, his disbarred, ne'er-do-well Uncle Ike, who shrewdly deduces that someone in his school is exacting retribution for a nasty divorce case handled by his mother. But to determine which of his classmates is holding that deep a grudge requires that Theo obtain the password to his mom's secured files. Can two wrongs make a right in this case?

As in most of his adult fiction, the protagonist in Book 3 of his Theodore Boone series, Theodore Boone: The Accused (Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer) (Dutton, 2012) doesn't always play it by the book, operating in the gray areas of right and wrong, going for what he sees as the greater good. It's easy to pick holes in the author's somewhat Swiss-cheesy plotline, and it is fair to point out that often Theo behaves and talks more like one of Grisham's thirty-something heroes than a middle school kid, but Grisham is first and foremost a storyteller, and once he's laid down his premise, the reader is off and running in one of his fast-moving page-turner legal thrillers. Likened to such staples of the juvenile mystery genre as Encylopedia Brownand Nancy Drew, Theodore Boone combines the qualities of Leroy and Nancy with a generous dose of Perry Mason and a dash of Grisham's iconic renegade hero Mitch McDeere.

Oh, and as for the resolution of the case against the golf course murderer Pete Duffy, indicted by the work of Theo Boone in the series opener, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, readers are going to have to wait for Book 4. Accused wife murderer Pete Duffy disappears without a trace on the night before his trial opens, so we'll have to wait for the next sequel, to give our busy kid lawyer a shot at bringing this perpetrator to justice.

Missing Persons: Vanishing Acts by Phillip Margolin

By the time eighth-period science rolled around, Madison had started to get the hang of junior high. She'd figured out where her classes were, where the seventh graders hung out, and where the eighth graders ruled. But she still hadn't seen Ann, and she was convinced that something bad had happened to her.

The stars of their elementary school's state champ soccer team, Madison Kincade and her BFF Ann Beck had promised to rock the secondary school soccer world together, but after being away in Europe with her father all summer, Ann has not shown up at their new school, nicknamed "The Grove." When she doesn't turn up for the one-time-only soccer team tryouts, Madison is sure there is more than just a casual mystery there. The daughter of a criminal case lawyer, Madison knows more about dark deeds done in the night than the average kid her age, and has a penchant for investigation herself.

And then another mystery presents itself in a wee-hours telephone call to her father from the husband of her second-grade teacher, Mrs. Shelby. A busybody neighbor has reported that she saw Mr. Shelby removing what looked like his wife's body to their station wagon after an early morning screaming fight. The snoopy gossip's story is bolstered by the physical evidence found in the Shelby kitchen--a blood-spattered counter, a bloody knife, and a missing wife. Madison now has two missing persons to sleuth out as she begins her middle-school year.

Phillip Margollin and daughter Ann Margollin Rome combine their talents in the first of a proposed series of Madison Kinkaid mysteries, Vanishing Acts (Madison Kincaid), Madison is cut from the classic Nancy Drew cloth, and in this first book she deals capably with the problems of middle-school life--a jealous eighth-grade bully, Marci, who trips and elbows her viciously at soccer practice, and a good-looking boy who is keen to join Madison in her after-school investigations of the two missing persons in her life. This is a light-hearted mystery, with no terrifying scenes or insoluble conflicts in the plot line, but an attractive and self-sufficient young detective who manages to help her father with his cases whether he asks for it or not. With a resourceful young sleuth and a cute guy sidekick in place, this looks like a series with a lot of promise.

Along with Leslie Margolis' recently introduced Maggie Brooklyn series (see my review of her first book, Girl's Best Friend (Maggie Brooklyn Mystery), here, the girl detective genre is certainly alive and well.

Faux Beaux! My Fake Boyfriend Is Better Than Yours! by Kristina Springer

I make a big production out of opening my e-mail in a new window. "Oh, look. A kiss."

"What?" Sienna asks. She scoots over to look at my screen.

I launch my e-kiss. "Awww...look at that, Sea. Isn't it cute? The big kiss is thinking about the little kiss in the thought bubble. And there's a message: 'I'm thinking about you all the time. Oh!"

I look at Sienna, and her lips are drawn tight and her eyes are narrowed. I think she must be jealous.

I smile and sing in my head, My fake boyfriend is better than yours.

Tori and Sienna have been best friends since Kindergarten. But when Sienna goes away for a luxury beach vacation for the summer and stops e-mailing or IM-ing, Tori is afraid that she'll be starting the first day of seventh grade without her longtime best friend.

On the big day she finds Sienna (if it is Sienna!) in the center of a group of admirers. She has a glamorous tan, a stylish outfit, and her short brown curls are now a long, chic blond do. "Extensions!" Sea whispers she gives Tori a quick hug. And indeed it is a made-over Sienna, complete with a dreamy beach boyfriend named Antonio. Antonio, who IMs her constantly, sends flowers for the first day of school, and whose cute romantic sayings soon have the would-be popular crowd swooning and flocking around the new Sea. Tori knows Sienna as only a long-term best friend can, and she senses intuitively that Antonio must be an invented soul mate.

But two can play that game. Tori has spent part of her summer with her dad in Chicago, and quickly setting up a new e-mail account, she creates her own summer flame, Sebastian Colander, who is everything Antonio is--and more. And since both of the boys are now distance romances, the rest of the girls fall for the stories hook, line, and sinker, and Tori and Sea find themselves the center of the seventh-grade social scene.

But the tension of keeping up such an extensive lie begins to wear on Tori and on their friendship.

I really need a break! I don't know about real boyfriends, but fake boyfriends are exhausting. This week alone I had two imaginary marathon phone calls from Sebastian. I fake-baked and mailed him a batch of his favorite M&M cookies (using only handpicked blue M&Ms; it's his favorite color and I'm thoughtful like that.), and I had to make a big fuss out of the oooey-gooey love note he e-mailed me.

Honestly, I don't know how people with real boyfriends keep up with them and go to school at the same time. I may wait to date a real boy until I'm out of high school.

And then on their morning news there is the REAL Sebastian Colander in Chicago, a super-good-looking eighth grader who rescues a mother and baby from a fire, and Tori is suddenly scrambling for more details about the famous Sebastian. Then Sea raises the ante by announcing that her Antonio is coming for the fall dance. Tori realizes that the stakes have been raised and that she has only a few days to come up with the real Sebastian Colander for the dance.

Oh, what a tangled web...!

Kristina Springer, whose earlier funny and realistic Spin The Bottle documented the beginnings of boy-girl attractions in middle school, has another story of junior high romance (or non-romance), My Fake Boyfriend is Better Than Yours (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010), a real winner which deals humorously with the themes of truth and trust in friendship amid the tension of making it in middle school.

As School Library Journal's reviewer says, "The themes will resonate with any girl who's ever gone through the hardships of middle school: friendship, boys, popularity, and, most importantly, choosing to do the right, but often more difficult, thing. A fun read."