The Meanest Girl

Alyssa, the feisty, often amusingly melodramatic narrator of Allie's promising debut novel, is convinced that the new girl in her sixth grade class is ruining her life. Hayden elbows Alyssa in the face and appears to be threatening her rapport with her best friend, Chelsea. So when gooey Popsicle sticks, pepperoni and a bogus love letter appear in Alyssa's locker, she's convinced that this "meanest girl in school" is responsible. The plot takes a trenchant turn when Alyssa learns that her father, whom she'd been told had died in a motorcycle accident, had instead left home when she was a baby—an admission her mother makes after Hayden confides that her own father had walked out on her family a year earlier. Meanwhile, Chelsea starts acting distant and convinces Alyssa and other friends to start a silly club to ensure that they're "still popular" when they get to high school. (In one of the novel's many on-target lines, a fellow club members ingenuously asks Alyssa, " 'Are we popular now?'... wondering if she's been popular this whole time and didn't know it".) Readers will surely catch on before Alyssa does that Hayden is hardly a villain, yet will find the narrator's path to this realization—and to a deeper knowledge of herself—credible and poignant. Ages 8-12. (June)