Back to School: Violet in Bloom (A Flower Power Book) by Lauren Myracle

Lying isn't okay. But hurting a friend's feelings isn't okay, either. Hurting even a non-friend's feelings isn't okay.

Which is more important: being a good friend or a good person?

Oh, wow, Yasaman thinks.

The basic aha has to do with how life is hard for everyone. The specifics are more complex.

And it is the specifics, getting into the weeds in the garden of relationships, so to speak, that is putting the blight on the Flower Power Bunch, in Lauren Myracle's just published paperback edition of Violet in Bloom: A Flower Power Book (Abrams Books, 2011), the second book in the series which began with her popular 'tweener novel Luv Ya Bunches: A Flower Power Book. The four diverse but devoted girlfriends, Katie-Rose, Yasamen, Camilla, and Violet, share names taken from flowers as well as their every thought on their LoveYaBunches website. School has just started and the girls rely on each other even more as they settle into the dynamics of fifth-grade, with its shifting friendships, fashion worries, and romantic complications becoming a big subject of their messaging.

At first it's all bubble-gum, pink-fonted, bubbly buoyancy in flower-power land, but reality begins to intrude when Katie-Rose and Yasaman discover the evil trans-fats and empty calories in their class's midmorning snacks--no-cheese Cheezy D'Lites--and set out to design a class campaign for a healthier alternative. Milla's moms' suggestion, organic beet-flavored Yums, are a bust with the class's taste testers, but the friendless Natalia senses an opportunity to work her way into favor with Yasaman by designing WHY SNACKRIFICE? buttons for the entire class to help the group's campaign. The girls get permission to do a grade-level presentation on the evils of trans-fat riddled snacks, giant food conglomerates and industrial animal farming, but when their iconic cute pet pig gets loose, the girls are in trouble with their teachers and out of favor with their more conventional classmates.

And that's just the main plot. Yasaman feels for classmate Natalia, friendless and wearing a clumsy-looking headgear which makes her lisp like a caricature toddler, but Katie-Rose resents Natalia's maneuvers to drive a wedge between her and Yasaman. And when their rivalry eventually breaks into open classroom conflict, Katie-Rose winds up in detention in the principal's office.

Meanwhile, Violet is conflicted over visiting her mentally ill mother, who calls her to the school office telephone to beg her to come; Vi knows that the class weirdo, Cyril, has overheard most of the conversation and can't resist taking his private journal to discover what he knows and if he plans to tell what he knows. The de rigueur mean girls, Modessa and Quin, are up to their usual tricks, picking on poor Cyril and anyone else who gets in their way. And to further complicate the mix, Milla is in the midst of a brand-new and official romantic "liking" with the adorable Max when she accidentally (and fatally) steps on his escaped hamster Stewy.

Veteran author Myracle (author of Ten) and others in her best-selling The Winnie Years series, covers a lot of ground in one significant September week as her Flower Power girls open up to some of the serious realities of their world. Told partly in textings on their web site, partly in straight narration, and partly in imagined scripts by the film-struck Katie-Rose, this book tills the fertile field of girl world without trivializing the often stereotyped pre-teen socialization process. Myracle is a sure-footed writer who knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff in her novels, providing insight into even minor characters regardless of their likability, and keeping it all light, humorous, but nevertheless meaningful.

School Library Journal says, "...this is trademark Myracle, and those who "heart" her books will lurve, er, love this one too."

Friending and Unfriending: My Best Frenemy by Julie Bowe

Stacey is my one and only best friend. Maybe if I was taller or wider or louder or prettier I would need more than one so I could spread myself around more. Like Brooke Morgan. She’s the prettiest girl in my fourth grade class at Purdee Elementary. She’s also tall. And kind of loud. It takes a lot of friends to soak her up.

But not me.

And not Stacey.

We’re happy with just one best friend each.

But it’s the middle of the fourth grade, and things are changing. Brooke has dropped her former best friend Jenna and seems to have decided to make Stacey her new BF. And Stacey seems to like it that way. She hangs out with Ida when she’s not doing dance stuff with Brooke, still sharing a giant cookie at the Purdee Good Café after dance lessons, but the other times when the two have usually spent time with each other seem to have been lost to Brooke’s constant demands.

Then, when Jenna’s Truth or Dare game becomes the girls’ favorite recess activity, Ida is dared to shout “There’s a mouse in my macaroni and cheese,” in the cafeteria and gets sent to the principal along with Quinn, whom Randi accuses of planting the miscreant mouse in the macaroni. Ida feels compelled to tell the truth for Quinn’s sake and finds herself ostracized by the girls. Even Stacey, although sympathetic, seems to be avoiding her everywhere.

Strangely, Jenna seems to be the only one who wants to spend time with her, prickly Jenna who always seemed the bossy one in the group. Then Ida learns that her penance for “spilling the beans” to the principal is a triple-dog-dare, requiring that she let Meeka pierce her ears at Brooke’s sleepover. Ida’s parents have told her she absolutely cannot have her ears pierced until she is at least ten, and besides, Ida is really scared of Meeka’s big embroidery needles! How can she get out of this triple-dog-dare and still stay friends with the girls?

In this pivotal entry in her Friends for Keeps series, Julie Bowe’s My Best Frenemy (Friends for Keeps)(Dial Books, 2010) is a funny, poignant, and honest account of the changes in middle elementary friendship. Ida is a self-aware and clear-eyed observer of the normal shifting in relationships as the girls diverge in their interests and begin to notice that boys have real possibilities as well:

I think about how much I like meeting Stacey and sharing a cookie and talking about best friend stuff. But sometimes plans change. Sometimes friendships do, too. Not in a bad way... Just in a different way. Maybe even a good way. Because even though I still like Stacey, I know I’m not exactly like her.

And that’s okay.

Fans of this insightful series will not want to miss My Best Frenemy (Friends for Keeps) and Bowe's forthcoming-in-July sequel, Friends for Keeps: My Forever Friends and will look forward eagerly to seeing how the changes within the girls’ relationships will work themselves out as the school year comes to a close.

Words Are What We Have: Word After Word After Word by Patricia MacLachlan

"Is what you write real?" asked May.

Ms. Mirabel liked that question. "Real or unreal. They're just about the same. They are both about magical words."

"Do you write with an outline?" Russell asked.

Ms. Mirabel laughed loudly. It was a sudden, startling laugh, and we all laughed, too.

"Of course not," she said. "Outlines are silly. Once you write the outline, there's no reason to write the story. You write to participate... to find out what is going to happen."

"I write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to," she said.

Miss Cash frowned. That is not what she had taught us in creative writing class.

It is the final six weeks of fifth grade, and Miss Cash has bravely brought in an actual writer, Ms. Mirabel, to work with her writing class. Miss Mirabel has "long, troubled hair," and a offbeat take on the writing process. The four friends--May, Evie, Russell, Lucy, and Henry--are intrigued with her ideas. Each has something they fear will not come out the way they want in their lives: Lucy's mom has cancer; May's family has suddenly decided to adopt a baby; Evie's mom has left home; and Russell's beloved dog had just died. Henry's life is perfect, and considering his friend's problems, he worries that he can't hold on to that perfection.

Bit by bit Ms. Mirabel leads the children to begin to write about themselves, their fears, their sadness, the things they love, and gradually the magic of words, the magic of making something unreal and yet real out of them, flows through them.

Newbery author Patricia MacLachlan's latest Word After Word After Word (Katherine Tegen/Collins, 2010) is a short, easy read, but not a book for the early chapter reader per se, requiring the experience of the middle reader to really get her theme, complex but offered in simple narrative form, that middle elementary children can absorb. Pair this one with the Newbery-winning Sharon Creech's award-winning Love That Dog and sequel Hate That Cat: A Novel to help middle graders understand what poetry is and what it can do.

Christmas Wishes? The Christmas Genie by Dan Gutman

You're probably not going to believe this story.

Fine. That's okay. It's a free country.

But I know what happened, because I was there. Where's there? Lincoln School in Oak Park, Illinois. Fifth grade.

It happened just before winter vacation, on December 21. That's the winter solstice....

Foreshadowing!! English folklorists know that it is on the shortest, darkest day of the year, when the unseen world is closest, that strange things can happen. It was on that midwinter eve when, in Susan Cooper's Newbery-winning The Dark Is Rising (The Dark Is Rising Sequence), Will Stanton's walk in the new-fallen snow takes him back in time to fight the renewed rising of the forces of darkness.

Dan Gutman's latest, The Christmas Genie, doesn't involve cosmic battles with good and evil, but a presentiment of a squat, wise-cracking spirit which emerges from a meteorite which falls, auspiciously, right through Chase's desk, interrupting Mrs. Walters' science lesson, which appropriately enough is on meteors. For a thirteen million light-years old genie, "Bob" is amazingly with it, dressed in flip flops and a tie-dyed tee and spouting the latest put-downs.

"You speak English?"

"Any dope can speak English," the genie said. "It's Japanese that's tricky."

"You ARE a genie, aren't you?" I said.

"Well, I ain't Santa Claus, that's for sure."

The disgruntled gremlin does make a deal with the amazed class--he'll grant one wish in return for their silence about his sudden appearance, with the caveat that they must come up with it within the hour or Bob will cancel their winter break. Mrs. Walters, ever vigilant for a teaching opportunity, springs into action, handing out 3 x 5 cards and instructing each student to submit one wish for class consideration. That woman can make an assignment out of anything, Chase grumbles to himself.

"Oh, one more thing." Bob said, "Remember the old saying--'Be careful what you wish for.'"

Borrowing from folklore, Gutman slyly makes that theme real for the fifth graders. Chase's wish for "all the money in the world" is shot down quickly by the class pragmatist who points out that if no one else had any capital, there would be no products to buy with his money. Other wishes prove equally problematic: kids get the vote? But they'd probably elect Miley Cyrus president, one realist says. Room-sized flat-screen TVs for everyone? Some people don't even have electricity or houses with walls to put them on, another points out. Every day is your birthday? You'd be dead in three months! The clock clicks inexorably forward as the stack of wish cards shrinks, with no agreement among the kids.

Will Mrs. Walters' class wind up with no wish and no winter vacation either?

Gutman, a best-selling author praised for his ability to draw reluctant male readers under his free-wheeling, humorous spell as shown in his earlier Nightmare at the Book Fair, and his prolific My Weird School Daze series (found here: and his historical sports fantasy series, Baseball Card Adventures (see here), manages to come up with more than just a goofy Christmas story. Gutman's books are known to be potent boy bait, while, as in the case of The Christmas Genie, artfully slipping in some thought-provoking themes among the hilarious and inventive plot lines. As one reviewer put it, "Gutman packs plenty of history, science, and ethics lessons in this fun, well-paced fantasy that happens to take place at Christmas, but will be enjoyed at any time of year. This book is laugh-out-loud funny from page one."

Good Onya, Jillian James! Diary of a Would-Be Princess by Jessica Green

In our class there are groups. I call them:

The Princesses--That's Skye, Megan, Kirrily, Sarah, and Karlie. And Tegan, too.

The Rough Heads--That's just about all the boys, except Nigel. And it includes Amanda.

The Dorks--Nigel. And Vincent. Or is Vincent a Rough Head?

The Normals--The rest of the class, except one or two kids who are Loners. Most of the Normals and Princesses reckon I'm one of the Dorks. Especially since I have to sit next to Nigel. I wish I were a Princess.

Mrs. Bright gets really angry when we talk about the groups. She says we're all individuals and we shouldn't label people. I can't help that. It's tradition.

Jillian James, fith-grader (or fifth year, in Aussie-speak) is made to keep a journal by her hard-working teacher, Mrs. Bright, and in it she records the social landscape of her class as it progresses through the school year. Jillian's is a remarkably perceptive voice as she deals with the cliques and quirks of her own small universe. A dag (klutz) at sports, weak at maths (math), and a natural-born writer and observer of humanity, Jillian's journal and Mrs. Bright's perceptive handwritten remarks in it chronicle a year in which Jill finds her place in the order of things, discovering her real self within a new circle of friends, mostly boys and others who are the anti-Princesses of the class.

Identifying with her teacher, who struggles to bring together the disparate groups into a more tolerant team, Jill organizes a party for the whole class which she believes to be a disaster until the next school day, when she finds everyone is still talking about how much fun it was. Never mind that her toddler brother sat in the tub of soft drinks and her teenaged brother hung balloons with his dopey putdowns scrawled on them in all the trees, or that the pop-star-wannabe Princesses' song and dance act was a bust! Everyone agrees that it was all so funny that they'll never forget Jill's party.

As Jillian's self-image takes on new shape (and her maths grades improve), she also begins to empathize with the nerdy Nigel, the dyslexic Sam, and the anti-social Vincent. As the year progresses, the class does begin to come together, and Nigel, Sam, and Vincent also begin to shed their "traditional" personas a bit. When the rambunctious Vincent is made to replace a ball belonging to the class, he swipes one from a neighborhood shop and is arrested, but Jillian organizes a committee to write character references to the police and principal, and Vincent begins to be accepted again by the class. At year-end ceremonies, Jillian is honored with a public speaking award for her speech on the appropriately-chosen topic of procrastination and deservedly receives the grade-level citizenship award.

Diary of a Would-be Princess (Journal of Jillian James) would make a great read-aloud for an American fifth-grade class, in which the groups Jillian struggles with are all too familiar. Although the Aussie terms (footy for soccer, texta for pen) are a bit off-putting initially (a glossary translating Down Under slang into American slang is appended), the Australian setting will actually give kids in the States the little bit of distance from Jill's fifth-year social scene needed to gain some insight into their own classroom stereotypes and outcasts. Jillian's voice is so real, so genuinely honest, and so funny that everyone will be pulling for her by the end of the novel.