Middle School Is Worse Than Meatloaf: A Year Told Through Stuff by Jennifer L. Holm

Anyone who has sorted through the bits and pieces of another person's life--the bedside table of a son or daughter who has moved on to college or marriage, the purse, pockets, or picture albums of someone who has passed away--knows the poignancy that the little things of a person's life can hold and the stories that they tell.

In her Newbery Award and Honor Books Our Only May Amelia and Penny from Heaven, Jennifer Holm has proven that she can craft a linear narrative novel with the best of them. In her new book Middle School Is Worse Than Meatloaf: A Year Told Through Stuff she combines elements of scrapbooking and the graphic novel to tell the story of Ginny Davis' seventh-grade year. Related solely through full-page collages of to-do lists, instant messages, schoolwork, grade cards, notes from her mom, teachers, and friends, bank statements and retail receipts, and all of the flotsam and jetsam of daily life, Ginny emerges as a believable seventh grader who meets life head-on, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, and sometimes fighting to a draw.

Ginny's Big To-Do List!!!

1. Get a dad
2. Get the role of the Sugarplum Fairy in the Nutcracker
3. Look good in the school photo for once!!!
4. Do something with hair to make nose look smaller!! Color?? Perm??
5. Win something. Anything!
6. Try to be friendly with Mary Catherine Kelly.
7. Get pink sweater back!
8. Convince Mom to let me go see Grampa Joe over Easter Break.
9. Get Henry to chill out.
10. Ignore horoscopes whenever possible.

Some of Ginny's paper trail are funny-sad in the way that early adolescent events can be. Working on doing "something with hair to make nose look smaller," we see a drugstore bill for "Strawberry Cream" haircolor juxtaposed to a hair salon bill for "Haircolor restoration: red to blonde" and "Haircut and Style (remove burnt ends)," followed by the To-Do List with item 4 crossed out. We see a diary entry which begins with a poetic description of the promise of a newly waxed and painted school:

"There's nothing like the first day of school, you think."

And ends with

"And then Brian Bukvic shouts, "Hey, Banana Nose!" and you know you are back in school.

In an early English paper Ginny tells how her father was killed in a meaningless accident when she was very young. A later newspaper clipping describes her mom's remarriage to a guy named Bob, attended by Ginny in a dress of her favorite lemon yellow and her little brother in a tuxedo and his beloved red cape. A series of police blotter articles report ever-worsening vandalism and petty theft which culminate in her brother Henry's arrest for stealing his stepdad's car and burglarizing a local business. An appointment card for a family session with psychotherapist follows a discipline slip for Ginny for hitting her ballet rival Mary Catherine Kelly after she called Henry a jailbird.

It is a year in the life for Ginny--losing the lead in the Nutcracker but winning the Science Fair, breaking her arm and getting braces before the big dance and still being asked to the Spring Fling by Brian Bukvic, a year made up of trivia and tragedy and some personal triumph with which readers can readily identify.

Holm's one-of-a-kind narrative format and unique artwork by Elicia Castaldi and Matt Holm (the author's brother) work together seamlessly to make this a middle school story that middle school kids will feel right at home in.

Drawing On Her Strengths: Ellie McDoodle, New Kid in School by Ruth McNally Barshaw

THE END

Seriously. This is the end. I'm doing this new journal to keep track of my family's move to a new house (new city, new schools, new everything). There won't be much to keep track of, though, because this is the END of everything good.

Eleanor McDougal, a.k.a. Ellie McDoodle, graphic diarist extraordinaire, introduced in Ruth McNally Barshaw's Ellie McDoodle: Have Pen, Will Travel, is back in an even-better sequel, Ellie McDoodle: New Kid in School. In this one, Ellie's problem is worse than camping with worrisome relatives in the woods: she's moving away from her six best friends, her house with her own room with her own clouds painted by her own mother on her own wall, her school where she knows everyone, and even her nickname, McDoodle, for her constant cartoon commentaries on daily life.

In the new place, she has to share a room with her high-school senior sister and go to a school where nobody knows her name and nobody can get it right. (On the first day she's called Eleanor, Allie, Ella, Elmo, Ollie, Ellie McDoo-gal, and, worst of all, Smellie McDoo-doo.) The school already HAS a best artist--Rachel--so nobody, including the cranky art teacher, Ms. Trebuchet, cares about Ellie's comic drawings.

But Ellie's got spunk and resilience and a dab hand for a caricature on her side. She sets out to find something good in her neighborhood and finds a humongous library and great woods to explore. And at school she finds a way to put her art skills and Ms. Whittam's social studies unit on non-violent protest to good use--organizing some long-needed action against the slow lunch line that leaves her class three minutes to actually eat their lunch--if it is indeed edible! In the course of designing a logo for the movement (a circle with a capital Q (for queue) with a diagonal line) and stickers and T-shirts with the logo for her co-protesters, Ellie wins the hearts and minds of most of the class--and the majority of the school board members--and becomes a fifteen-minute media darling when the protest turns up on the evening news.

Ellie even gets her nickname back from her new classmates and writes a new END to her current graphic diary.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED:

1) When I'm most sad, I should watch, because things are bound to get better.

2) A brand-new situation is like a blank canvas: I can be a real artist and make it great.

3) It's okay if new people don't like me right away. They will eventually.

4) From now on, I'm going to find the "new kid" and be friendly.

I need a new sketchbook. This isn't the end... it's only the beginning.

Ellie McDoodle: New Kid in School is an empathetic, funny, and highly readable semi-graphic novel, a format which seems to be in style these days. In addition to the best-selling Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw, recent books which make use of this format for middle school girls include Katie Davis' The Curse of Addy McMahon, reviewed recently here, Margie Palatini's Geek Chic: The Zoey Zone, reviewed here, , Marissa Moss' Amelia's Notebook series, two of which are reviewed here, Rachel Renee Russell's Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life, and the similar format adopted by Newbery author Jennifer Holm in her unique graphic collage-styled Middle School Is Worse Than Meatloaf: A Year Told Through Stuff, reviewed here. All of these engaging middle school characters are transitional sisters under the skin with whom 'tween readers will feel right at home.

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.