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Library | Material Type | Item Barcode | Shelf Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Avon-Washington Township Public Library | Juvenile Fiction Book Hardback | 120791000755647 | J VAN | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Carolyn is a girl with strong opinions. On being a girl: 'stupid.' Wearing dresses: 'only when forced, and then with shorts underneath.' Summer nights: 'make you feel invincible.' Girls with MaryJjanes: 'no use at all.' The boy next door: 'I do not have a crush on him!' The top bunk: 'for really great dreams.' She thought she knew how she felt about everything. But the summer before the sixth grade, though everthing seemed the same, it all felt different.
In this wonderfully funny first novel, Wendelin Van Draanen perfectly captures the emotional earthquakes of growing up and growing into oneself.
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-6--This episodic novel relies heavily on descriptions of qualities or habits children would call "gross": fatness, baldness, sweat, huge bellybuttons, disgusting eating habits. The narrator, 12-year-old Carolyn, identifies with boys and despises most females, young and old. She hates being a girl mainly because boys would rather play with other boys. The chatty narrative expresses her thoughts about life and describes the mild trouble she and her brothers get into. A lack of dialogue hinders development of the other characters, seen mainly through Carolyn's eyes. Despite her avowed toughness, the protagonist follows the all-too-common path for fictional tomboys. She begins to mellow when her baby sister is born, and she develops a crush on a boy in her neighborhood. Perhaps the unspecified time setting, in which girls have to wear dresses to school, makes it inevitable that she will be "tamed a bit," as she puts it. But anyone looking for a positive picture of girls and their strengths will have to look elsewhere. The book's undemanding structure and its reliance on "grossness" will appeal to unsophisticated readers who may be drawn in by the promising title and the dust-jacket illustration of a defiant, boyish-looking girl. For better-written novels about nontraditional females, try the still timely Isabelle the Itch (Puffin, 1992) by Constance C. Greene or Delia Ephron's The Girl Who Changed the World (Houghton, 1993).Kathleen Odean, Moses Brown School, Providence, RI(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this energetic first novel, saucy, opinionated sixth-grader Carolyn narrates her exploits as, over the course of a summer, she spies on her "freeko" neighbors, digs foxholes in the yard, hurls dirt clods at her brother and steals a book from the local dimestore. Either this version of suburbia is set in an undefined past, or it's something of a throwback-girls have to wear dresses to school, and only boys are allowed to have paper routes. Carolyn chafes at the restrictions placed on her until she finds a way to get around them: she wears shorts under her skirts and helps her brother deliver the Daily News. As the sticky, childish pursuits of summer give way to the music lessons and classroom politics of September, Carolyn finds herself attracted to Charlie, her foxhole-digging companion, and begins to tackle injustices by drawing up petitions and speaking her mind, rather than by tagging after her brothers. When, at the end of the book, a baby sister is born, Carolyn feels a deep connection. She whispers her philosophies to the infant: "I tell her... how being a girl is actually all right once you figure out that you should break some of the rules instead of just living with them." A sunny, funny look at a girl with a smart mouth and scabby knees. Ages 8-12. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
Sixth-grader Carolyn describes the minor scrapes she gets into at home, in the neighborhood, and at school. The narrative is only mildly entertaining, and the book's setting in a vague past era will puzzle readers. Though Carolyn eventually decides that it's good to be a girl, as long as you break the rules sometimes, her problems with girlhood actually appear to be resolving themselves because she's outgrowing her tomboyness. From HORN BOOK 1997, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Van Draanen's first book has a crackling pace, funny lines, and an iron-willed heroine with a knack for putting herself in the center of all the action. Sixth-grader Carolyn doesn't act like a girl, and doesn't look much like one either, clad in boys clothing and wearing her hair very short. She likes to spy on the neighbors with her two brothers, play stickball, and dig foxholes in the backyard. Of girls who play with dolls and wear too much lace, she has low opinions, and hardly counts herself in the girl camp at all until some unfamiliar feelings surface for her stickball buddy, Charlie. When her baby sister, Nancy, is born, Carolyn decides that being a girl is really okay, now that she has an ally in the family. The era in which the story takes place is never specified, and while Carolyn's voice is contemporary, some of the problems she faces are dated, e.g., having to wear a dress to school and being unable to have her own paper route because she is a girl. Regardless, her irreverent narration is engaging and she's refreshingly astute about family and neighborhood dynamics. Blithely entertaining. (Fiction. 8-11)