On the Clip Board

There are many familiar faces on the list this week.  Word of mouth and peer recommendations go far in our school, and these are some of our students' favs!

The Name of This Book is Secret, by Psuedonymous Bosch

The Falcon's Malteser, by Anthony Horowitz

Stanford Wong Flunks Big Time, by Lisa Yee

Peter and the Shadow Thieves, by Dave Barry & Ridley Pearson

TMBS and the Prisoner's Dilemma, by Trenton Lee Stewart

Violet in Bloom: A Flower Power Book

The girls are back ready to start really using their website and to get past the FIST incident (Fake Incident of the Stolen Turtle) that ended up bringing them all together in the first place.  After Katie-Rose posts a meet up on Luvyabunches.com, Yassaman wants to get the girls to start to honor their second promise after being FFFs, which is to use their flower power for good.  She has an idea that she wants to share with the girls, but Katie-Rose's strong personality is making it hard to do.  Yassaman takes to their website to tell the girls.

Yassaman wants to launch a snack attack!  She has been doing some research and has discovered that the Cheezy Nips that their teachers hand out at snack are really bad for you and filled with the kind of ingredients that lead to being overweight and having heart problems.  She just needs to girls to help her come up with some ideas as to how to make their school a Cheezy Nip free zone.

Each girl is looking at the problem from her own angle, but each girl has something else going on in her life as well!  For Milla it's her crush on Max.  She's even willing to overcome her fear of his hamster to spend some quality time with him.  After all, he's smart and cool and nice...Milla figures that is worth holding Stewy (the hamster).  She even starts to like Stewy, and everything is going great until he gogo boot and Stewy get a little too close for comfort.  Now she's mortified, still crushing and she can't look Max in the eye.  The snack attack seems like a good distraction from her worries, so Milla digs into some research and finds out some stuff about the company that makes Cheezy Nips that really makes the girls want to get them out of their school.

For Violet, it's her mom.  Her mom is still in the hospital dealing with her issues, and Violet hasn't even been to see her, even though her dad has asked her to go.  Violet's just not ready.  But when she gets called down to the office one day for a phone call, and her mother's on the other end begging her to come visit, what can she do?  To make matters worse, Cyril was resting on a mat in the office and he heard the whole thing.  Sure Cyril doesn't talk much, but he is always writing in that notebook, and while Violet was on the phone he was scribbling away.  Just how much did he hear?  And what if he tells?

Katie-Rose is stressing because Natalia keeps shoving herself into the flower friends.  She has jumped on Yassaman's snack attack idea with vigor, even making cute buttons for kids to wear.  Katie-Rose does not like how Natalia is always with Yassaman and seems to be trying to push her out of the way.  Katie-Rose decides that she will be the one to make the snack attack idea work, no matter how over-the-top her methods may be.

Can these four friends put their own issues aside and get the job done?

Once more Lauren Myracle has written a friendship story that rings true.  There is so much going on in the middle school years, and 6th grade is definitely a time of transition.  The girls are passionate, but still trying to find their voices and their way.  It's easy to be mean without meaning to, especially with friends, and Myracle gets it just right.  The worrying, the loving and the anger.  I really like how each girl brings something to the story, and I really like how they genuinely care about one another.

If you have any doubts as to whether food ingredients or maltreatment of animals are issues that are on 6th graders' minds, let me tell you that they are.  The school where I work had significant cafeteria changes after a group of middle schoolers looked into the treatment of animals by a certain company.  The school no longer orders from that company...and it was all thanks to the students!

Fans of the first book will eat this one up, and new readers will not have a problem getting into this episode of the story.  The cover appeal alone will take this off the shelves, but readers will hand it from tween to tween and it may not come back to the shelf for a while!

My Self: A Guide to Me

Advice guides for tweens are always tricky. They can't talk down to readers, and they can't sound too much like your mom. Every girl wants to see herself somewhere within the pages, and when she recognizes herself, she wants to feel good about the changes that she can make.

Marlene Wallach, the President of Wilhelmina Kids & Teens Modeling Agency, along with Grace Norwich, has put together a lifestyle guide that gets it right.

Using a magazine style format, girls can easily read through sections of advice about confidence, fitness and friendship. From the "Ten Commandments of a Better Body Image" (involving advice such as surrounding yourself with supportive friends, the importance of wearing clothes that are comfortable to you, and respecting your body) to fun activities for boosting self esteem (talking positively to yourself in the mirror, doing improv with your friends, and finding activities to do on your own), readers are bound to find something that speaks to them. Quizzes and lists round out the chapters, and I can picture friends breaking this book out during a sleepover and discussing their answers. There are also real girl stories, dealing with an assortment of topics such as being biracial, starting a business, and moving to a new country.

This spiral bound book mixes photographs of girls, with tween friendly cartoons and graphics. Inspiring quotes from famous people ranging from Oprah to Confucius pepper the text.

While the girls shown are of differing races and ethnic groups, it would be nice to see girls of varying body types and sizes in the pages. Since Wallach is the head of a modeling agency, I am assuming most girls featured are models. It is nice to see many smiling faces with braces, since so many tweens are going through the same thing, but a few more differences might be nice!

Overall, this is exactly the kind of book that I recommend to parents when they want to help their daughters out with self esteem and the tween/early teen years. There are 3 additional titles in the series: My Beauty: A Guide to Looking & Feeling Great, My Life: A Guide to Health and Fitness, and My Look: A Guide to Fashion & Style.