The Outsider:: Confessions from the Principal's Kid by Robin Mellom

To be clear, I have no desire to be at the top of the School Coolness Pyramid--if that even exists. I just want to be part of something.

Almost everyone avoids me now like I'm some sort of rat--who tells on people and uses her connections to get them in trouble. (See previous info about my mother being the principal.)

It's complicated. Allie West's mom's promotion from regular teacher to principal just happens to coincide with the ITCP--the Intense Trading Card Phase. a craze for swapping Mammal-Morph cards, led by chief nerd-boy Graham Parker, whose hand-drawn super-gecko El Guapo cards become the hottest item at recess. The rivalry's squabbles spill over into the classroom; Allie's mom has to ban the cards from the school; and when one is found in Allie's desk, she inexplicably blurts out that it belongs to her best friend, Chloe Alvarez. Allie becomes tattletale-non-grata all over the school, and poor Graham goes from superstar to the butt of everyone's jokes, especially the jibes of bully-in-chief Joel Webster. Graham is an easy target, the weird kid who carries his grandfather's clarinet everywhere he goes and apologizes to poles when he walks into them.

Now Allie West finds herself the chief Outsider. Her only friends are the custodian Frances, who lets her use the super floor polisher to secretly remove the spitballs Joel launches daily at Graham, Miss Jean, the cafeteria manager who puts her in charge of spagetti inventory, and the Afters, a motley group of teachers' kids who have to stay late after school--their leader, fourth-grader Lexa, "born with a clipboard in her hand," fifth-grade outcasts Allie and Graham, and second-grader Maddie Vicario--who meet undercover daily to play Eavesdropping Bingo and come up with Acts of Random Awesomesauce for the staff. It's definitely a group with inside information, the ones who know all the shortcuts around the school and where the snack foods are kept in each classroom.

Confession: I also know where Frances stores the extra toilet paper, and I'm embarrassed that I'm a little proud of that.

Allie's one chance to re-friend Chloe and her friends is to make the Pentagon Math Team, hoping to spend enough time with Chloe to apologize and restore their friendship. Unexpectedly, she's paired with Chloe on a project and their time together goes well. When Chloe invites her to her birthday party, Allie feels like her days as outsider are over. But then she overhears the other guests talking about her.

"So embarrassing for her," Andrea was saying. "Chloe was so bummed she had to partner with her and invite her over to work on the project."

"Does Chloe even like her?" Sophie asked.

"Who knows? I'm sure Allie's mom called to get her invited to this party, too."

I back away slowly and slip out the front door.

I'm alone. Being an insider at school--knowing the ins and outs--it all makes me an outsider.

I hate being the principal's kid.

Fifth grade is complicated. Allie's relations with her parents and the kids at school are so hard to unravel. How can things go so wrong when everyone seems to be trying to do the right thing?

There comes a time when relationships stop being a smooth grassy playground and start being a playing field full of stumbling blocks, as Allie West discovers in Robin Mellom's forthcoming Confessions from the Principal's Kid (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).

Mellom's protagonist is likable, smart, funny, honest, and yet lonely, as she tries to navigate the sudden changes in her life. Sooner or later--perhaps much later--most people find themselves somehow on the outside, looking in. Allie discovers who her real best friend is--Graham, who stopped being her friend during the school day to spare her from taking the treatment that fell on him, and from there she realizes that even complicated things make sense when seen from the other side.

Making new friends is sometimes a struggle, but it's also important to leave no one behind, she learns. Using her own experience as a principal's kid and an After herself in this strong character-driven story, Mellom's Allie helps middle readers vicariously experience some of those tangled webs we mortals weave along the way.

Canned! Captain Underpants and the Tyrannical Retaliation of the Turbo Toilet 2000 by Dav Pilkey

If you're concerned about what is going on here, don't worry. George and Harold are confused, too. You see, George, Harold, and Captain Underpants had just undergone an epic adventure that started out in the dinosaur age and ended at their school, forty years in the future. Now, thanks to Melvin Sneedly (the tattletale genius) and his time-traveling Robo-Squid suit, they were all hurtling backwards in time. Back a long, long time ago to that dull, old-fashioned age known as the present.

Oh, I almost forgot. Traveling with them were three purple-and-orange-speckled eggs laid by their pet pterodactyl, who with their other pet, Sulu the bionic Hamster, had just saved the planet.

See? That wasn't confusing at all, was it?

Got it? Well, never mind, because George and Harold arrive back at their old school just at the moment they left, flushed down the Purple Potty. Sneedley informs the lads that they no longer are on the lam for the bank heist, back then, er, yesterday. He's hacked into the bank's computer and altered their surveillance tapes.

"Just don't grow a mustache or a beard anytime soon, and you guys'll be fine."says Sneedley.

So, with the evil Turbo Toilet 2000 stuck in the future, or whatever, the guys are fine. All they have to do is pretend to do their work in school while they draw comics to sell to their classmates to fund their fun and... But wait! The boys forgot that the next day back in the present was the big multiple-choice, timed-test day--and if they don't pass, they'll be stuck in Principal Krupp's elementary school for even more eons. Exhausted, they go to bed early, but awake to find that they've slept through their testing. Nooooo! Not another year in Ms. Ribble's miserable class at Jerome Horowitz Elementary School!

But wait! They can fix this. They sneak into Smedley's garage and borrow his time-traveling Robo-Suit and set it to take them back to yesterday so they can pass their tests. What could go wrong?

George and Harold ace their tests and dash to their tree house for some R & R and discover one tiny glitch...

George pushed the tree house door open and looked inside. "Oh, NOOOOOOO!" said George.

Harold climbed up and looked inside. There, sleeping at the table, was Harold himself. And next to him, snoring on the beanbag chair, was George.

"I don't understand," George whispered. "How come WE'RE here?"

"Oh, I get it," said Harold. "This is us from yesterday!"

George, Yesterday George, Harold, and Yesterday Harold are now a doppel gang of their very own, and the more the merrier, in Dav Pilkey's latest silly graphic novel saga, Captain Underpants and the Tyrannical Retaliation of the Turbo Toilet 2000 (Scholastic Press, 2014). In this eleventh book, not only are there two of this dynamic duo, but Mr. Krupp morphs into Captain Underpants on cue and Melvin Sneedley, Super Diaper Baby, and Mr. Krupp's faculty--Miss Anthrope, Mr. Meaner, Miss Labler, and Mr. Rected--all get cameo roles in the plot, until the hullabaloo flushes out the Turbo Toilet 2000 and he's finally sent down the tubes... But ...what about those extra Harolds and Georges?

"Oh, yeah!" said Yesterday Harold. " I guess there are a lot of loose ends in this story."

"Uh-oh! That can only mean one thing!" said Harold.

"Another SEQUEL!"

Kids need not despair. With two pairs of their heroes to screw up, there are bound to be still more Captain Underpants stories. "Subversively hilarious." says Publishers Weekly. "Dizzyingly silly!" adds Kirkus Reviews.