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The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. by Kate Messner. September 1, 2009. Walker Children's. 208 pages. ISBN: 9780802798428

Gianna is a procrastinator. She knows she has to collect 25 leaves for her science project to avoid being kicked off the cross-country team, but as the deadline approaches, she finds herself becoming more and more distracted and less and less prepared to complete the assignment. To make matters worse, her grandmother has started to become very forgetful, to the point that she gets lost in familiar places and forgets the names for household objects. Gianna’s mom doesn’t want to admit that anything is wrong, which makes Gianna even more anxious and even more distracted. There’s also a mean girl at school who seems determined to sabotage any progress Gianna makes. It’s a good thing Gianna has a great friend like Zig to help her get through the tough times - he might be her only hope for things to work out!

I enjoy Kate Messner’s Marty McGuire books, and her mystery-adventure books about the Jaguar Society, and I was curious to see what her early middle grade novels are like. Though I couldn’t get into Sugar and Ice, The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. grabbed my attention from the very start. Gianna is a likeable girl whose flaws seem very real to me. It seems like I have read a lot of books about girls who are really bookish, responsible, and focused, but not as many about sports-minded athletes who struggle to finish homework assignments and whose lives are somewhat up in the air. I like that Gianna doesn’t have it all together, but that her heart is in the right place, and she never stops trying.

I also enjoyed the relationships Gianna has with the supporting characters. Gianna’s mom, grandma, and best friend, Zig, each came strongly to life, and I loved the gentle ways they supported Gianna even when she was driving them crazy with her disorganization. It was also very satisfying to see Gianna eventually forge her own path where she gets her assignment done in her way, with her own style, instead of in a traditional format that might work for more traditional thinkers.

The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. is a great middle grade novel about a very real girl. Readers will easily empathize with Gianna as she struggles to conquer her homework assignment, and they will fully understand her frustrations and triumphs on the road to success. I would recommend this book to girls who have enjoyed Ann M. Martin’s Ten Rules for Living with My Sister and Tricia Rayburn’s Maggie Bean books. It’s a perfect choice for middle school girls, especially those who might not relate to more picture-perfect fictional heroines.

I borrowed The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. from my local public library. 

For more about this book, visit Goodreads and Worldcat. 

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Luke on the Loose. by Harry Bliss. 2009. Candlewick. 32 pages. ISBN: 9781935179009

Luke on the Loose is a TOON Book - a story for new readers told in comic format by Harry Bliss. At the park, Luke gets tired of listening to his father’s boring adult conversation with a friend. Unable to take it any longer, he takes off after some pigeons, calling out “Yaaaaah!” as he goes. While his dad enlists the police to track him down, Luke knocks over a bicyclist, interrupts a marriage proposal, and finally climbs onto a roof to take a nap, creating a frenzy at every point on his journey.

Luke on the Loose is one of the best and funniest easy readers I have ever read. It captures not only the boredom of a child waiting for his parents to stop talking, but also the explosion of happiness associated with freedom from that boring situation. “Yaaah!” is the perfect sound for Luke to make - it tells us everything we need to know about his feelings, and it’s great fun to say out loud. All along the way, subtle comments from animals and people alike add to the humor of Luke’s wild run through the city. Pigeons call him “Coo Coo.” A cat peering out the window thinks to himself, “I’ll never let my kittens chase pigeons.” A mouse even suggests that Luke is just another city pest. These deadpan statements perfectly juxtapose the slapstick humor of the illustrations, making the laughs come that much faster.

Luke on the Loose reminds me a lot of Nina in That Makes Me Mad. Both celebrate the individuality of children, and celebrate their independence and emotions. Just as kids relate to the things that make Nina mad, they will relate to the fun of Luke’s sprint through the city and they will be comforted by his safe return to his parents in the end as well. Recommend Luke on the Loose to little ones with lots of energy, and laugh along with them!

I read the TOON Online Reader version of Luke on the Loose on the TOON Books website.
 
For more about this book, visit Goodreads and Worldcat.

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Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life. by Rachel Renee Russell. June 2, 2009. Aladdin. 282 pages. ISBN: 9781416980063

Nikki Maxwell is a fourteen-year-old eight grader and a self-proclaimed dork. She writes daily in her diary about the humiliations and injustices of her life at Westchester Country Day School, which she attends on scholarship thanks to her dad’s job as the school exterminator. In this first book in the Dork Diaries series, Nikki tells of her troubles with her locker neighbor, the perfect, but mean, McKenzie Hollister, and of her new friendship with the well-intentioned but also dorky Chloe and Zoey.

This book makes for very quick and easy reading. Nikki’s voice, though less snide and sarcastic than Jamie’s in the Dear Dumb Diary books, is appealing and relateable. I think Nikki’s experiences are pretty typical of what happens to many girls in middle school. The emotions of her daily dramas reminded me of things that happened to me in the mid-1990’s, and contemporary kids will recognize the added agony of not yet having a cell phone. There is also a lot of humor in the book. The manga-esque drawings often depict little jokes about McKenzie, or about Nikki herself, which really enrich the story and keep Nikki from becoming too much of a stereotype.

I did have a hard time buying that Nikki was fourteen. Somehow, she sounded much younger, in the same way that the Baby-sitters Club girls don’t really sound thirteen. I realize the younger-sounding narrative voice is meant to appeal to middle grade readers rather than teens, but I think it would have felt more natural to me had Nikki been presented as a 12-year-old. Every time her age was mentioned, I was surprised to remember that she was so old.

I’ve been reading books from both the Dork Diaries and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series in recent weeks, and it has made me wonder quite a bit about what makes them so popular. One thing that struck me when I was reading this particular book was the fact that the black and white illustrations allow the reader to impose any skin tone, hair color, or eye color onto the characters. I wonder if part of what makes the books so popular is that every kid can truly see herself in the characters. The author has told us (in this interview) - and I think she does in the books as well - that Nikki is Caucasian, Chloe is Hispanic, and Zoey (Zoeysha) is African-American, but since race isn’t a heavy theme in the book, readers could easily begin to imagine their own friends’ features when they think of these characters. There are obviously many more reasons kids enjoy these series, but I think there is something to be said for the possibilities presented by black and white drawings rather than full-color illustrations or none at all.

All in all, this book falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of “middle school experience” novels. It’s not quite as cheerful and saccharine as Nancy Krulik’s How I Survived Middle School series, nor it is as sardonic as Dear Dumb Diary. It strikes a happy medium between naivete and disillusionment, and provides a story that is at times cringe-worthy, but moreover entertaining and easy to breeze right through.