Good Boy! Boys Are Dogs by Leslie Margolis

Annabelle had lived a sheltered life. Her elementary school was just for girls, so through fifth grade, for her and for her girlfriends Mia and Sophia, boys were not an issue. At dance night at summer camp, however, Annabelle gets her first inkling of the fact that boys are a different species, if not actually aliens from planet Mars.

On the night of the dance we decorated the room with streamers and decorated ourselves with cool outfits, cherry flavored lip gloss, and glittery eye shadow.

We looked fabulous. We tried out our goofy new dance moves, wolfed down pretzels, and sipped punch. It was a blast. Fantastic. Some even called it blast-tastic. But that was all before the boys showed up.

They filed off the bus, messy-haired and slouchy. Every single one of them wore regular old shorts or jeans and ratty T-shirts.

Once inside, they stood in one corner in an unfriendly, lumpy clump. Instead of dancing, they pushed each other around. Rather than eat our food, they threw it at one another. Then they tore down our streamers. At some point a bunch of them snuck out and threw eggs at our cabins.

Then Annabelle is forced to move and finds herself in a regular middle school with a bunch of tweener boys whose behavior is even worse than that of the regrettable boy campers. Eighth grader Jackson, whose sister kindly befriends Annabelle right away, calls her Spazabelle, steals her book report and drops it in cafeteria catsup, and generally makes her want to hide whenever he comes into sight. Tobias, the boy behind her in English, kicks the back of her seat every 60 seconds throughout the whole period and when he turns out to be her science lab partner, hogs the microscope and refuses to let her do her assignment.

The rest of the boys she meets are, from her point of view, rude, sloppy, and totally out of control. Finally, Annabelle surprises herself in English class on Monday:

Something weird happened at school on Monday. As soon as Tobias' foot made contact with my chair, I turned around and said, "Tobias, stop."

And Tobias actually looked at me. He seemed surprised and a little alarmed, like he didn't know me and maybe realized that I was someone he didn't want to mess with.

Where did that come from? Annabelle wonders. And then it hits her. She is using the same techniques as those in the book she got to train her puppy Pepper.

Talk to dogs in their own language. Your tone is just as important as your words. Don't ask them. Tell them. You're the boss, so act that way.

At home she flips through the dog training book to the section called "HOW TO BE THE DOMINANT DOG."

Think about it this way: in a group of dogs you can always spot a dominant dog in the pack by his swagger. He walks with his chest pushed forward, confidently. This designated leader is in control.

Annabelle thinks about the way Jackson swaggers down the hall, his loyal pack trailing a few paces behind. Then she suddenly gets a mental image of herself at school:

Then I thought about how I'd been walking around school--rushing from place to place, totally lost and confused, my eyes on the ground, my posture hesitant. I'd acted totally weak. No wonder boys picked on me. I was sending out wimpy signals.

Suddenly Annabelle knows what she has to do: train these boys the same way she is teaching Pepper, with confidence, strength, rewards, and praise for good behavior. And it works. Middle school boys don't become gentlemen overnight, but most of them begin to treat her with a decent level of respect. Even in the final showdown, eighth-grade top dog Jackson backs down, and Annabelle knows her days as Spazabelle are almost a thing of the past.

Leslie Margolis' Boys Are Dogs takes on dealing with bullying boys as one of challenges of making it in middle school with ready humor, insight, and skillful writing. In her forthcoming sequel,Girls Acting Catty due out in the fall of 2009, Margolis takes on an even bigger challenge of middle and junior high school--the snooty girl clique. Good luck with that one, Leslie. A lot of girls will be waiting for your take on this challenge!

Mystery Hound: Girl's Best Friend by Leslie Margolis

On Sunday, I put on my softest jeans, my scuffed blue Pumas, and one of Finn's baggy old shirts. I dumped my schoolbooks out of my backpack and filled it with some dog-walking supplies instead. I slipped my camera into my back pocket and slung my dad's binoculars around my neck to complete the disguise.

Looking like a girl going after an evil dognapper was too dangerous, which is why I transformed myself into Maggie Brooklyn, Bird-Watcher.

I even looked up a bunch of bird facts in case I met another bird-watcher and had to act the part. I was ready.

Seventh-grader Maggie is used to being stealthy: she's a secretly employed dog-walker, a fact she hides from her parents, fearing that they'll say it takes too much time away from homework. When Isabel, the eccentric landlady of their subdivided Brooklyn brownstone hurt her foot and drafted her for doggie duty, Maggie couldn't refuse the two lucrative offers to walk other people's dogs, and she's already stashed over a hundred dollars in her hiding place in the unused fireplace in her room.

But when she catches ex-best friend Ivy in the process of pilfering her stash during her twin brother's party, Maggie gets drawn into the mystery of the disappearance of Ivy's dog Kermit. Ivy may now be a mean-girl frenemy, but her floppy -eared Kermit is still close to Maggie's heart, and she reluctantly agrees to try to discover the perpetrator behind the kidnapping of Kermit and several dogs in the neighborhood. Ivy shows her the ransom note and explains that she was just "borrowing" the money to get Kermit back. Maggie bones up on sleuthing with her mom's old Nancy Drews and agrees to go undercover on the case.

Between juggling her surveillance role, doing her daily dogwalking, and trying to come up with opening conversational gambits for her crush, Milo, Maggie is busy, but she is nevertheless drawn into a second mystery as her landlady discovers an unopened letter from her ex-husband, whom she had written off as a total jerk for stealing all her money, stating that in repentance he has hidden the returned money inside their brownstone in a hiding place she'll easily guess. But Isabel can't guess that hiding place, and when Maggie sleuths out the cause of the mysterious sounds inside her walls, she learns that when Isabel's impoverishment forced her to subdivide the brownstone into four apartments, concealed areas inside the walls remained and while her tenants are working, Isabelle has been feverishly searching their apartments for her hidden fortune. Suddenly Maggie knows just where the wayward husband must have hidden that money, prompting some secret sleuthing via secret passages herself.

Leslie Margolis' first book in the intended Maggie Brooklyn Mysteries, Girl's Best Friend (Maggie Brooklyn Mystery) (Bloomsbury, 2011) introduces an engaging girl sleuth to this popular genre. Margolis begins the novel in leisurely fashion, as befits the first book of a series, establishing her characterizations in telling episodes before the real mystery begins to unfold, but her usual comic flair for first-person narration carries the story along with plenty of energy until the plot thickens into a double mystery that puts the young detective through her paces in fine style for 'tween readers. The addition of Milo and Maggie's sometimes annoying twin brother Finn into the detection action makes this one good reading for both sexes. Don't judge this one by its less than exciting cover, because Maggie has a lot to offer. Also don't miss the just-published sequel, Vanishing Acts (Maggie Brooklyn Mystery) (Bloomsbury, 2012).

Margolis' earlier hilarious middle school stories include Boys Are Dogs and Girls Acting Catty.

Still Making It in Middle School: Girls Acting Catty by Leslie Margolis

Taylor's crowd--I mean Terrible T and the Three Terrors--sits just two tables over.

The next time Taylor walked by, Rachel said all sweetly, "I love those jeans."

Taylor mumbled an unenthusiastic thanks, at which point Rachel said, "At least that's what I thought when you wore them all last week."

We were pretty happy for about five minutes. Then Nikki walked up to Rachel, handed her a napkin, and said, "You have something on your face."

"It looks like spaghetti sauce," she said, and then pretended to be all embarrassed. "Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry. That's just your skin."

Sixth-grader Annabelle had thought all the transition problems were behind her. She and her mom had moved to a new town to be with her mom's new fiance, a.k.a. "The Dweeb." Always a student in a girl's private school, Annabelle found sixth-grade boys--those boys who tease and belch out the "Star-Spangled Banner" at lunch, kick the back of your seat, and hide your book report on the day it's due--totally intimidating until she discovered she could use the same techniques on the boys that she used training her puppy Pepper.

But girls had been no problem. Annabelle had fallen into a close group of four, all friends of Rachel across the street, and sixth grade, at least, seemed under control. That is, until things turn scary on Halloween night. Trick or treating, the girls are chased by egg-throwing boys and then confronted by Taylor and her "three stooges" who diss their carefully made costumes as babyish. Suddenly, even lunchtime has become a minefield of catty girl insults, and Annabelle feels like she's in over her head again.

And that's just at school. Her mom and The Dweeb decide to reset their wedding plans to the Christmas holidays, and The Dweeb's twenty-year-old son comes for an extended visit. Annabelle has all kinds of worries about dealing with an older almost-step-brother, but she would never have guessed that her problem was going to be massive crush she acquires on her first look at the handsome, sweet, and funny Jason.

And Annabelle never knew she'd be worrying that the conniving Taylor would find a way to come between her and best friends Rachel, Yumi, Claire, and Emma:

I tried reasoning with Yumi. "This was all just a big misunderstanding."

"Really?" she asked. "Well, don't misunderstand this!" Yumi stormed out of the bathroom and everyone else followed.

I leaned against the wall, stunned and alone. All this time I'd been stressing over which crowd to hang out with, and now no one liked me.

I'd gone from having eight friends to having zero friends in the span of three minutes. That's got to be some kind of record.

Leslie Margolis' latest in her middle school series, Girls Acting Catty (Bloomsbury, 2009), continues her realistic middle-school saga of Annabelle Stevens with the characteristic wit, insight, and common sense shown so promisingly with her earlier hit, Boys Are Dogs. (See my review here.)