Class Favorite

Sara Thurman suffers a string of humiliations that begins when her mother sends her roses at school—not to celebrate Valentine's Day, but because the eighth-grader has finally gotten her period. Then someone gets wind of Sara's entrance to womanhood and decorates her locker with tampons and napkins, and soon it seems that the whole school pegs her as a magnet for disaster. Sara wrongly accuses her best friend of blabbing her secrets and quickly accepts consolation from the all-too-obvious culprit, also embarking on an improbable scheme to be voted Class Favorite for the yearbook. Morris (Original Divas ) hammers lessons about loyalty and forgiveness a little too noisily, and some of Sara's catastrophes feel more manufactured than comic. Nonetheless, the author creates a funny twist to the tried-and-true theme of adolescent angst in the unexpectedly composed way Sara handles each cringe-inducing crisis, and girls will like this character. As lagniappe, Morris opens each chapter with a thematically related, magazine-style quiz question (“Are You the Keeper of Secrets or the Disher of Gossip?”); answers can be scored at the end to discover “Which Yearbook Award Will You Receive?” Ages 9-13. (Nov.)