Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Click Here (to find out how I survived seventh grade)
Fiction Series
For ages 12 and up
Little, Brown And Company, 2005 ISBN: 0316058998
Erin Swift is terrified. She is going into middle school, and who knows what is going to happen to her there. Erin and her best friend Jilly are going to be in separate units for the first time ever, and since Erin does not really have any other friends, she doesn’t know how she going to survive. To make matters worse, Jilly isn’t even in school on the first day. Instead she is bed recovering from a bout of strep throat.
It doesn’t take long for Erin to get into trouble. Before the end of that first day, she has punched the horrible Serena in the face and she has paid the principal a visit. In response to Erin’s punch, Serena and her friends launch a campaign against the girl, doing everything they can to make Erin’s life as miserable as possible.
Erin is prepared for her life to be one long disaster when things start to get better. She is asked to join the Intranet Club, and because she knows so much about website design, she is soon the star of the group. Then she makes friends with Rosie and Mark. Mark makes Erin feel really strange, and she sometime has a hard time behaving normally around him. How can the presence of a boy make her feel so awkward and nervous?
Erin dares to hope that her life is actually going to be pretty decent when it takes a nosedive into a place where nightmares live. Could things get any worse?
Written with chapters that shift between Erin’s blog and a narrative, this wonderful book gets inside the world of a tween who is trying to adjust to being in middle school. It is funny, poignant, and often very powerful. Erin discovers that there are times when it is actually good when bad things happen to you. Only then can you really figure out what kind of a person you are on the inside.
