Tuesday, June 27, 2017

35. Posted by John David Anderson

Read on my iPhone
2017, Walden Pond Press
384 pgs.
Middle Grades CRF
Finished 6-27-17
Goodreads rating:  4.34 - 254 ratings
My rating: 4
Setting:  Contemporary small town Michigan

First line/s:  "I push my way through the buzzing mob and freeze, heart - struck, dizzy."

My comments: This book looks bullying right in the eye and takes it on.  It doesn't give answers.  The writing is beautifully crafted, taking a few major themes and weaving them around and together, the unifying link being  friendship, where it comes from and where it goes.  Quite a book.

Goodreads synopsis:  From John David Anderson, author of the acclaimed Ms. Bixby’s Last Day, comes a humorous, poignant, and original contemporary story about bullying, broken friendships, and the failures of communication between kids.
In middle school, words aren’t just words. They can be weapons. They can be gifts. The right words can win you friends or make you enemies. They can come back to haunt you. Sometimes they can change things forever.          
     When cell phones are banned at Branton Middle School, Frost and his friends Deedee, Wolf, and Bench come up with a new way to communicate: leaving sticky notes for each other all around the school. It catches on, and soon all the kids in school are leaving notes—though for every kind and friendly one, there is a cutting and cruel one as well.
     In the middle of this, a new girl named Rose arrives at school and sits at Frost’s lunch table. Rose is not like anyone else at Branton Middle School, and it’s clear that the close circle of friends Frost has made for himself won’t easily hold another. As the sticky-note war escalates, and the pressure to choose sides mounts, Frost soon realizes that after this year, nothing will ever be the same.

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