Friendship-Blendship? 12 Before 13 by Lisa Greenwald

Dear Ari/Arianna/Little Miss Cool Camp Girl/BFFAE,

How's camp? I still can't believe you're gone! I might never get used to it!

Sooooo, things here are fine. I've been hanging with the lunch table girls a ton. I feel like we're all really bonding! We went to the comedy night at the performing arts center. We had the best time! BTW--did you get the big P again?

I miss you more than those sparkly Mary Janes we had in fifth grade!

XOXOXOXOXOXOXO,
Kaylan

Arianna is loving her first sleep-away camp, Camp Silver. Her bunkmates are like soulmates already, and she's beginning to get into the sessions on Judaism, especially since she's facing her Bat Mitzvah in the fall. There's even a cute, funny boy nicknamed Golfy who seems to like her a lot. But Kaylan is her BFF, and Ari can't help feeling a touch of jealousy thinking of Kaylan "bonding" with their lunch table girls and worrying about facing eighth grade alone if Kaylan comes to like them more than her while she's away.

And when Ari returns home, she does find it hard to get that special relationship with Kaylan back to the pre-camp level, especially since she misses her camp friends so much. She and Kaylan still work on THE LIST, thirteen things they want to achieve before their thirteenth birthdays, but Ari finds it hard to watch how much fun Kaylan is having with the lunch table girls and how hard it is to fit back into that group. Item #1 on The List is "Keep our Friendship Strong," and Arianna never dreamed that that one would be so hard.

"Let's just take a break from each other, okay?" yelled Kaylan.

I lean against the brick building and cry. I take the list out of my bag and rip it to pieces. Barely any of it even makes sense to me anymore.

I don't need to "tell a boy how I really feel." I need to tell Kaylan how I really feel.

Seventh grade means that it's not easy to mesh with two groups, where loyalty to one sometimes seems disloyalty to the other. School work is harder, and with Bat Mitzvah classes, she seems always to be rushed. But when her dad loses his job and Ari discovers that her mom is considering selling the house, she finds her emotions are torn three ways. One of the responsibilities of her Bat Mitzvah is to be a "woman in her community," and dealing with it all is making Ari realizes that her roles are changing, no matter how much she misses the security of her old life. Life was so simple back in sixth grade!

Lisa Greenwald's second book in her Friendship List series, both funny and serious, finds her two best friends turning thirteen and finding it hard to meet their own expectations, much less those of everyone else, in her Friendship List 2: 12 Before 13 (Katherine Tegen Books, 2019) narrated by Arianna. There is plenty of adolescent angst and teen drama as the two friends renegotiate their friendship and work their way toward maturity, but there is some powerful growing up going on as well. Fans of Greenwald's popular first book, Friendship List 1: 11 Before 12, written in Kaylan's voice will find this one a must-read, a moving and insightful page turner of the changing ways of being a friend, daughter, and "a woman in her community." And Greenwald's next in this series, Friendship List 3: 13 and Counting, is just out and ready for readers.

Meet The Creator: MEGA Awesome Notebook by Kevin Moore

A long time ago in a microwave far far away....

Mom! Mom!

A kid wakes up in a silent house. In the kitchen there's a note:

Sorry, sweetie!Had to leave early for work. Lunch is in the fridge.Mom X0XX0

Pulling a slice of cold pizza from the fridge, he put its paper plate down on top of his green notebook and rushing to nuke it, he puts both in the microwave.

A cloud of awesomeness was released into the world.

When the kid recovers, he rushes for school. and when he opens his notebook, he begins to draw a dude he names Dud. And then a dog for Dud. And then another Dud. (They are a pair of palindrome pals!) Ha! Now it's a duel of Duds. The two compete at efforts to erase each other. It's a nasty little battle between the two little duds.

This is war, with a series of characters--the dumpy algebra teacher, a little smart alecky Einstein, devils, dragons, monsters, space cats, aliens, warring medieval fantasy critters, even Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer. Dud #I even creates Little Cretin, who provides rude sounds from several orifices.The Kid thinks it's time to shut down the whole notebook world.

SLAM!

The Kid stuffs his notebook into his backpack and it falls out as he runs down the hall, leaving footprints that say, "You're Not Crazy!" behind him. He runs for the front office to call Mom, who can't leave work to check him out. The school secretary offers him a Tylenol.

But as he trudges to his next class, he meets a girl named Val, who returns his notebook.

"It's hilarious," she says with a shy smile.

Inside the green notebook, Dud has had enough. He finds The Way Out and runs into the creator, who explains the notebook.

"It's where the creator hides his fears. Where no one can see."

And maybe the way to erase those fears is to face them out in the world, where they really live, in Kevin Minor's Mega Awesome Notebook (Schiffer Publishing, 2019), in which the real conflict is working out his fears about his family split-up. Resolving the conflicts inside and outside are one of the difficult tasks in early adolescence. Dealing with divorced parents, awkwardness with a girl, a grouchy math teacher, those can be more dread than dragons and deadly erasers, but maybe if he tells Val about his day....? That may just be the Way Out.