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.

Justice Must Be Served! Revenge of he Green Banana by Jim Murphy

Beginning with the first day of Kindergarten, Jim Murphy has had a talent for making himself persona non grata with the Sisters of Mercy who run St. Stephen's Elementary School. In fact, Jimmy is "blacklisted," with his deportment, or lack thereof, encased in a scarlet folder with his name prominent on the front. But this year, in sixth grade, he determines that things will be different. He chooses a seat, not with the usual suspects--Vero, Phillip, Iggy, and Mayor--but close to the front, near his new crush, Kathy Gaithers, whom he hopes to impress with his change of persona.

But his history has preceded him. His new teacher, the towering and imposing Sister Angelica Rose, has already prepared her deportment plan for James.

"I know who you are, Master Murphy," Sister Angelica said. She opened the drawer of her desk and pulled out a red folder, the name MURPHY was written in big, bold letters. A red folder with your name on it in big, bold letters is not a good sign, in case you haven't guessed. "All your previous teachers have told me about you and your"--she held up the folder and waved it around--"your various antics. I want you to know from the start that I will not tolerate any such behavior here. None. Am I clear, Master Murphy?"

Sister Angelica makes Jimmy move his desk to the back of the room, unfortunately where he cannot see his beloved Kathy from behind the wide back of the rotund Joey and within whispering distance of his former partners in crime. His hopes of reformation grow dim as Sister Angelica continues her intolerance of any deviation. She assigns her pet student, Ellen McDonald, to call Jimmy every night to coach him on his homework. The last straw comes when she makes him copy an assignment over one time for each misplaced or missing comma and misspelled word.

Jimmy vows revenge. Sister Angelica must be murderlated! His pals excitedly join the plot, even Al the Second Grader, who shares their lunchroom table. They concoct a wild plan involving a tripwire in the refurbished bowling lane at the back of the stage, rigged to drop a bag of flour on Sister Angelica when she ceremoniously bowls the first ball down the lane at the end of term program.

Jimmy's bad luck doesn't desert him. As punishment for one offense, Sister Angelica orders him to report to Sister Mary Brian. Puzzled, Jimmy finds her cheerfully rehearsing her second graders, a troupe of singing, box-stepping bananas, onstage for a rehearsal of the program.

"Children," said Sister Brian, suddenly very perky, "I believe that James Murphy here is the answer to our prayers."

"I believe we have found our Green Banana!"

Jimmy begins to understand that his penance is to waltz center stage in a second-grade musical, costumed as an enormous green banana. Suddenly his wildest visions of "murderlating" Sister Angelica become a clandestine scheme to humiliate his nemesis in front of the whole school and parents, too. Jimmy and his co-conspirators throw all their talents into their plot, aided by Jimmy's easy access to the stage and his friendship with the custodian Bernie.

Will Sister Angelica Rose get her comeuppance with a face-full of flour, in front of everyone? Will the Green Banana, despite all odds, have an attack of self-sacrificing remorse? Or will both events occur, more or less simultaneously? In his admittedly autobiographical novel of life in a 1950s parochial school, Revenge of the Green Banana (Hougton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2016), author Jim Murphy sets his humorous coming-of-age story in a Catholic school where classrooms filled with sixty students require a strict discipline which some of the Sisters of Charity seem to take way too much pleasure in dispensing.

But to his surprise, Jimmy begins to see beyond the end of his own out-of-joint nose, as Ellen McDonald's assigned nagging pay off with higher grades and he gets a better understanding of his teachers, even giving aspiring coach Sister Angelica lessons on her jump shot. Middle readers will get a snapshot look at a well-meaning, but ill-fated protagonist and long-vanished school days, along with the poignant and somehow sweet first-person narrative of how the great St. Stephens Green Banana Caper went down. Despite the more than half-century elapsed since those days, middle-schoolers will find this one absolutely absorbing, with a preposterous premise and an all-too-true theme of growing up that goes down easy.

Let the Eggplant Wars Begin! Isabella for Real by Margie Palantini

Saturday, 10:21 a.m.
Scene 1/TAKE 1
Attic Bedroom Closet

Can an eleven-year-old go to jail for fibbing, faking, and personality perjury? Just wondering.

"ISABELLA!"

Scene 1/Take 3

"ISABELL-AH!!!!"

Yes, she is me. Guilty. All four syllables.

He/him/him/he: Vincent. My cousin--my almost brother--who, by the way should never ask me to help him with anything again.

It's complicated.

It is. Isabella's college film-school cousin had recruited her to play the central character in some videos featuring her colorful Italian Jersey family. Isabella assumes these are class assignments and being a bit of a ham herself is happy to help. Little does she know he also uploads them to YouTube, where Isabella and her extended family's funny vignettes go immediately viral!

Now Isabella is about to begin sixth grade at the rather elite private Fortier Academy for Young Women, definitely different in poshness from her elementary school--Merciful Sisters on the Mount of Small Blessing. With her rich Aunt Kiki footing the tuition, Izzie is highly hopeful of establishing a new and more sophisticated image, but that hope looks iffy when she meets three typically cosmopolitan students, Oakleigh Lawson-Ng, Anisha Patel, and Emory Easton, who show an unexpected interest in her soap opera diva Aunt Kiki (a.k.a. Francesca Franchelli, the Contessa).

I spun around and saw three girls with perfect hair, perfect teeth, and perfect unbitten nails.

"Bonjour," they said.

It was going to be harder for me to fit in than I thought.

"Boon? Bone?... Uh, Ciao," I sighed finally.

"Hear that?" said the shoulder-tapping girl. Before I knew it I was surrounded by a trio of Madelines.

"She said Ciao! Told you it had to be HER! You are, aren't you? Isabella Antonelli?

Oakleigh whispered. "We've been wondering, what exactly do we call the daughter of a countess?"

Instantly, Isabella realizes that the girls are confusing her mom with her glamorous Aunt Kiki, former star of the long-running but lamentably discontinued daytime drama, Search for Truth, Lies, and Love, and that her home must be the opulent Italianate mansion portrayed in Vincent's film set. Isabella is filled with confusing emotions. She loves the sudden acceptance at school that her Contessa connection brings and tries to explain her relationship with some fuzzy fibs to her welcoming clique of popular Earl Gray-sipping friends. But oh, what a web we weave, as Izzie finds out as she is forced into more and more not-so-little white lives to keep the in-crowd trio's friendship piqued.

At last Isabella has got herself way in deep, and the posh preppies are clamoring for a meeting with the Contessa herself. Panicked, Isabella plies them with authentic Eggplant Parmesan purlioned from her eccentric Aunt Ellie and Aunt Minnie and stalls for time until she and her sympathetic cousin Frankie (not Frankie the cat, as we are frequently reminded) can persuade Vincent to film another video in his elaborate mock-up set of the Contessa's salon and persuade Aunt Kiki to make a comeo appearance to reinforce Isabella's new persona. It doesn't help that her Academy buddies self-reinforce their take on the whole faux affair, now gone viral on Youtube. Izzie's real house, a two-story frame house in an average neighborhood becomes part of a media frenzy surrounded by satellite press trucks. Isabella and the helpful Frankie are forced to clamber down the antique rose trellis (formerly Aunt Kiki's teenaged escape to adventure) to flee the paparazzi and try to salvage what is left of her at-jeopardy reputation at Fortier Academy.

Just be yourself, especially when she's not sure which self that is, is a tall order for Isabella Antonelli in this first book in the proposed Eggplant Wars series, Margie Palatini's Isabella for Real (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). Palatini is a veteran writer of hilarious picture books, and this fast-moving tale of a Jersey girl in the process of a self-makeover is only a bit far-fetched for the average middle school story, and middle readers who are trying to transition into a more mature image in their next school will right away recognize the all-too familiar pressures of moving on up.

Told in three streams--cleverly paneled comic-formatted pages by noted artist LeYuen Pham, flashbacks in which Isabella recalls how things got so complicated, and real-time first-person narratives combine to create a realistic look at an eleven-year-old trying to deal with her quirky, if comic, family and her own self-image as she moves out into a wider social setting, especially when complicated by her various identities in the ubiquitous social media world. It's a very modern middle school story with lots of laughs and a bit of a cautionary premise for readers just entering into their new milieu.

Palatini's forthcoming book is a great choice for the crowded middle school novel shelf and a worthily comic feminine-focused companion to James Patterson's best-selling Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life series (See reviews here).Isa

A Most Fearsome Oath: Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers School: We the Children by Andrew Clements

Mr. Keane grabbed hold and pressed something into his palm, quickly closing the boy's fingers around it. Then he clamped Ben's fist inside his leathery grip.

"This thing in your hand? I've been carrying around with me every day for forty-three years . . . and before that, the other janitors had it--everyone of them--all the way back to the very first man hired by Captain Oakes himself when he founded the school."

"Look at it...but first promise that you'll keep all this secret." He squinted up into Ben's face, his blue eyes bright and feverish. "Do you swear?"

Ben's mouth was dry. He'd have done anything to get this scary old man with bad breath to let go of him. He whispered, "I swear."

It was a large gold coin with rounded edges, smooth as a beach pebble.

FIRST AND ALWAYS MY SCHOOL BELONGS TO THE CHILDREN. DEFEND IT. DUNCAN OAKES, 1783.

Ben is late for homeroom, running down a back hall in hopes of avoiding detention by making it into his seat before roll call, when he sees the school's elderly head janitor in obvious pain struggling down the hall. Ben tries to help, but instead of sending him for someone, the old janitor seems compelled to pass on some sort of secret talisman to him, something to do with the fate of the old building which has been the town school for more than 200 years.

Ben Pratt knows that his historic school is slated for the wrecking ball at the end of his sixth grade year. Although he loves the old school, given to the town by an eccentric and wealthy sea captain to be its school in perpetuity, Ben has other things on his mind as the school year draws to its close. Not just middle school next year and his parents' painful separation, which is with him like a familiar pain, but more immediately the big sailing race coming up on the weekend where he and rival Robert Gerritt will face off again in the individual heat.

But when the intercom breaks into their afternoon routine with the announcement that Mr. Keane has passed away, Ben suddenly feels the power of the old man's charge hit him full force. And then, there's the mystery of the meaning of this secret that he swore to uphold. How can he defend an old school that is already sold and set for demolition to provide land for a theme park, Tall Ships Ahoy! which the whole town believes will bring nothing but prosperity to Edgeport?

Ben turns to the smartest person he knows, his friend Jill. Together they read the inscription on the back of the gold coin, cryptic directions to someplace "amidships on the top deck, north-northeast." Immediately Jill remembers the compass rose outside the girls' bathroom on the third floor of the school. "The top deck, of course," Ben intuits, and behind a strangely short piece of molding on the wall they find a copper plate engraved and signed by three students in 1791. Hurriedly Jill and Ben walk to Ben's dad's boat to read the message in private:

If you have found this message on purpose, then an evil day besets us.... Captain Oakes has given this school to us, the children, but he feared others would one day try to take it away.

What follows are cryptic clues to the steps the "Keepers of the School" must follow to defend it from demolition. Ben hastily copies the message onto his laptop, and as the two walk down the pier toward home, they are stopped by Kevin at the marina security booth. "This is for your dad," he says, handing Ben a business card which reads JACKSON SWERDLING YACHT BROKER.

Ben is puzzled. His dad hasn't said anything about selling his beloved boat. Jill's suspicions are aroused, and when she questions Kevin about the appearance of the so-called broker, both realize that he must be the school's assistant janitor, Mr. Lyman--an apparent spy for someone. But why? Could Lyman have heard something from Mr. Keane, and knowing that Ben was the last one to talk to him, could he have actually bugged his dad's boat to find out what Ben knows about the mysterious gold coin and its strange charge? Suddenly Ben and Jill realize that they, willing or not, are now the Keepers of the School, and that it is their charge to stop the destruction of the centuries-old school and prevent the construction of the multi-million dollar theme park on its waterfront site. But how?

In this first of a planned series of six novels in the Keepers of the School series, We the Children (Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School) (Atheneum, 2010), best-selling author Andrew Clements lays the groundwork for what looks to be a page-turning mystery/ adventure series. No one knows how to get inside the heads of the upper elementary/middle school protagonist better than Clements, and this series looks to both familiar and new territory for this very capable author. In this first volume, Clements provides plenty of intriguing clues and irresistible hints, along with a daring rescue at sea to wind up the action, as We the Children (Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School) kicks off what promises to be a a page-turning new adventure series for middle readers.

Lonely Guy: The Big One-Oh by Dean Pitchford

I couldn't really say that there was anybody in school who I could call a friend. And certainly nobody who would call me a friend.

Except Jennifer, and I didn't even want to be seen with her.

But is that so bad--not having friends? I wondered. After all I've got school, I've got Boing Boing my dog and Monsters & Maniacs comics and making dinner every night. My life is full, I told myself. Even if it does get a little lonely sometimes....

I hadn't thought of it before, but, yeah, it gets lonely.

Charley Maplewood has always known he has no real friends, but he has a life-changing moment of truth one afternoon as he watches his weird next-door neighbor Garry Quarky being dumped by his unattractive girlfriend, nicknamed "Pincushion" by Charley for her unattractive body piercings and prickly personality. As she wildly steers her van over Charley's mom's shrubbery, she yells out her final breakup complaint:

"You can't change, Garry. Look at you! You're a grown man with no social skills...no fashion sense... and NO FRIENDS!

Face it, Garry. You're a FREAK!"

Suddenly in Garry's devastated face Charley Maplewood sees his own future. Somehow, he realizes, he's got to get some social skills and some friends. (Fashion sense can wait.) Charley pins his hopes on a party to celebrate his upcoming birthday, the big one-oh!

His mother is overjoyed to see Charley acting like a normal kid, and the birthday boy throws himself into making plans for the food, the decor, the entertainment, and oh, yeah, the hardest part--some friends to attend. His mania for horror comics gives him the idea for his theme, "House of Horrors," but he's without a clue how to carry it out until his dog Boing Boing runs into a problem with Garry. It seems Boing has nabbed a fake bloody foot from Garry's garage and Garry is desperate to get it back. In the course of retrieving the disgustingly realistic latex body part, Charley and Garry hit it off and Charley learns that his freaky neighbor is a former special effects expert whose resume is filled with ultra-cool B horror films and whose passion is sculpting scars and dismembered body parts. When Garry offers his collection of grisly props as decor for the party, Charley's double-digit birthday plans are a go--except for coming up with some actual friends to invite.

Charley's birthday theme is disgustingly gross enough to attract eight possible celebrants--Donna, the class golden girl, and her followers Dina and Dana, Leo, the coolest dude in the class, Darryl, the class nerd, and Leland, a.k.a "Cougar," the class bully, and his hanger-on, Scottie, and, in a weak moment of compassion, the hopelessly dorky Jennifer. But then, when he accepts a UPS delivery of special latex for the absent Garry, Charley can't resist using some to try making his own body parts and accidentally burns down the garage. His irrate mom forbids him even to speak to Garry, and when she has to take on extra work on Saturdays to pay for the damage, she cancels the birthday party as well.

But Charley has already invited the guests, and he knows his reputation at school will go down the tubes if he has to un-invite them, so he resolves to do the party on his own. His party-day prep turns out to be a disaster: his sister opens the oven and his cake batter falls to the thickness of a pancake; the DVD player jams, canceling his fall-back plan to show a horror movie; and the only decoration he can come up with is the lame clown-themed helium balloon bouquet his father sent from Scotland. Then, just as Cougar pronounces this the suckiest party in the history of the universe, there's an ominous knock at the door.

Outside lightning bolts zapped and threw quick spooky shadows on the wall. Thunder rattled our windows. In low, horrid tones, the Monster rumbled. "The Birthday Boy asked me to drop by and eat some of his..." He stopped and cleared his throat. "I mean, meet some of his classmates."

Since Cougar was in front of the pack, I could see his face the clearest. And it went white. "Uh, Charley's here somewhere." he stammered.

"Charley? Ah," said the Monster. "I've already seen him."

And, as he said that, from out of his overcoat he pulled... my head!

I'm serious! He was holding my head by my hair, and it had been cut off at the neck!

Everybody's jaw dropped down so far that I could see who still had their tonsils and who didn't. Then, in one big tidal wave of noise, they all screamed together.

Of course, it's Garry to the rescue of the big one-oh party, and with the coolest, most spectacular birthday party entertainment under his belt, Charley's social status is secured. Even Cougar, who is so scared that he has to borrow dry underwear from Charley, looks like he's going to be on his side in the future. It's the best birthday ever for Charley Maplewood.

Dean Pitchford's The Big One-Oh has guaranteed guy appeal, but it's no simple gross-out story. Charley's clueless longing for social acceptance is genuine, and the other characters--his hard-pressed mom, the geeky but kind Garry, and even his sarcastic teenaged sister--come across as real people. There's humor and pathos and genuine fun here, making this a sure-fire good read for middle graders.

Common Ground: Extra Credit by Andrew Clements

Andrew Clements' books are all about finding a common ground. In his best-selling Frindle, Nick Allen's free-wheeling ways with neologisms (in this case "frindles" for ballpoint pens) comes up against his teacher's linguistic purism. In No Talking (reviewed here) the clash begins with the usual one between boys and girls and goes on to become a conflict between the kids and school authorities, with the students asserting that they "have the right to remain silent" to the eventual consternation of their teachers, and in his last novel, Lost and Found, (reviewed here) identical twins come to grips with their commonalities--and their differences.

But in his just published Extra Credit, (Atheneum, 2009) Clements takes on the search for common ground between two very divergent cultures.

In the search for enough extra credit to ensure that she is promoted to junior high, Abby Carson reluctantly takes on a cross-the-curriculum semester-long extra credit pen pal project, one which has her writing letters to a student in a village school in Afghanistan. Abby chooses the location only because she loves climbing the simulated rock wall in her school gym, and after all, Afghanistan has lots and lots of rocky mountains!

When Abby's hasty penciled letter arrives at its destination, however, the school authorities are in a quandary. Their best student is eleven-year-old Sadeed, by far their most proficient in English, but "Abby in America" is obviously female, and by local customs it would be unacceptable for Sadeed to correspond with a girl. Finally a compromise is reached, and Sadeed is asked to have his younger sister Amira dictate her replies to him to translate into his neat handwriting and formal English.

But when Abby receives his long, painstaking reply, she is suddenly ashamed of her slapdash first letter, and in truth, of her lack of attention to her own school work altogether. As Sadeed points out, he has no time or energy for climbing mountains; to him the Hindu Kush is a beautiful but overwhelming presence, whose ice and snow are a hindrance to communication and sometimes a threat to life. As the letters continue, Sadeed begins to put more of his own feelings into his "dictated" letters, and Abby is touched by the tiny rock Sadeed sends her, telling her that if she looks closely, she will see that it is a little mountain in itself. Feeling a bit ashamed that she called her level and fertile farm "flat and boring," she sends him a sample of rich Illinois soil, saying that if he looks closely, he will see in it a bit of an American field.

"I like that idea, that of all the people who have ever lived on the Earth, I am the very first one to touch this spoonful of soil. And now you are the second one.

It's the kind of thing that makes you think." she writes.

But just as Abby and Sadeed are beginning to understand each other's lives, fundamentalists in his village discover the project, and Sadeed writes one last letter to tell Abby that their correspondence has become too dangerous to continue. He is afraid, he says, that these people will make it impossible for his sister to continue to go to school. Sadly and thoughtfully, as Abby prepares her final oral report, she re-reads his letter. "Wishing you every happiness in your life," he had written.

It felt so final. Like a last good-bye. It felt like from now on she would be going along one road in life and he would be taking a different one.

In his first letter he had talked about the field of tall corn, the one in the picture she'd sent to him. What had he called it? Then she remembered--"like a smile of God."

And for the first time in her life, Abby really looked at the land speeding past her eyes in the June sunshine. She saw it through Sadeed's eyes.

And it wasn't flat and boring. It was beautiful.

In the Zone: Geek Chic: The Zoey Zone by Margie Palatini

... Being halfway to eleven is when you really absolutely need a fairy godmother the most. I'm going to require major fairy dust intervention in the hair department alone. There are just so many days a person can wear a hat, if you know what I mean.

HERE'S THE SPILL (VENUS-SPEAK FOR "EXPLANATION"):

Sixth grade is only 198 days away. That's not a lot of time to learn about all the stuff you need to learn about.... Venus says her sister says that if you're not cool by sixth grade, you are not going to live happily ever after in sixth grade. The Cool Police are taking notes.

There are some kids (Brittany and Ashley, a.k.a. The Bashleys), who have the cool quality innately--perfect little bodies that look good in whatever current style and hair that never even needs combing (although they do it constantly)--and rule the school from the center of the universe, their table at lunch. Others, like Zoey and her friend Venus, expend molto energy trying to catch the cool. Zoey's hair, however, stands up and out and every which-way, but mostly in her way on the way to popularity: she was apparently born with a terminal case of bed head, which she handles by wearing hats as much as possible, thereby acquiring hat head when she's ordered to remove them for violating Harry S. Truman School's Rule #5--Absolutely No Hats Allowed.

On a particularly bad hair day (day 181 in the cool countdown), Zoey covers her wayward locks as best she can with her grandfather's old fedora, and donning his vintage bowling team shirt (Grabowski's Tool and Die with Ray stitched on the pocket), sets off for school hoping that what she's wearing will pass the test as a costume of quirky retro cool. The hat is greeted with mixed reviews, but Zoey manages to avoid notice by her hat hawk principal, Mrs. Pappazian, as she makes her way to the hallway where her bulging locker is located. And that's when the fairy dust descends dramatically into the Zoey Zone!

There she finds a team of New York-ish garbed photographers from the 'tween 'zine U Grl, clicking photos of The Bashleys and selected Friends of Bashleys right in front of her locker. And at that moment a fairy godmother in the form of the project boss (Lady in Black named Jazz) turns and mouths the magic words which hold the Key to Cool for Zoey's future:

"Does anyone have something INTERESTING in their LOCKER, that we can USE in the PHOTOGRAPHS?"

"I DoooooooooOOOOOOOOOO!" says Zoey.

"Hmmmm. Interesting." says Jazz. "So, Ray, what have you got in that locker of yours?

Jazz watches with delight as a avalanche of items cascade from Zoey's locker--4 books on the presidents, a piccolo, 2 owl-puke pellets, a book on King Tut, 3 tennis balls, 1 tube of green paint, and a roll of orange duct tape--to name a few.

"Fun! Get all of this, Maya," Jazz orders her camo-booted assistant. "Geek chic? LOVE IT"!

Zoey and Venus become the stars of the photo shoot, Zoey is offered a blog/column in the magazine, and with the forthcoming U Grl featuring the new cool celebrities of Harry S. Truman Elementary, Zoey finds she now has the option of seating at The Bashley Table at lunch to choose (or NOT.) After all, Table Ten, with the other chic geeks, is the center of her own cool universe.

Palatini sets off her unique character's musings on the higher path to coolness in a short and spiffy little novel in which Zoey's creativity leaps from the page with a rich pastiche of fonts, text boxes, drawings, and visual gags that help this light and bouncy storyline bound off the page, making this book both cutting-edge graphic chic and fine fare for the reluctant reader. A sort of girls' answer to Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid and sequels, Geek Chic: The Zoey Zone has wide appeal to 'tween girls contemplating the call to be cool in middle school.

For another uniquely designed story of "making it in middle school," see my post on Jennifer Holm's Middle School Is Worse Than Meatloaf: A Year Told Through Stuff, reviewed here.