By Meg Cabot
Nine-year-old Allie is being moved across town to a creepy old Victorian and a new school, and she starts a notebook of rules to get herself through it.
Allie's parents buy an old Victorian house across town, which means giving up the perfectly good split-level, her school, and her best friend Mary Kay. Allie is sure her life is over, so she opens a notebook and starts writing down rules, one at a time, for how a person is supposed to act. The rules don't help much. She and Mary Kay have a huge fight over a birthday party, Mary Kay starts hanging around Brittany Hauser instead, and Brittany is not a nice girl. On top of all that, Uncle Jay lets Allie watch a horror movie she's way too young for, and now she's convinced a zombie hand is living in the new house. By the end, the move she's been dreading turns out to be the thing she actually wanted, though not for any of the reasons the grown-ups kept promising her. She figures that out on her own, rule by rule, and she's funny about it on nearly every page.
Most books about moving are picture books, written for a little one who doesn't get a say. This one is for the older child who does get a say and is furious anyway. Allie's nine. She's losing her best friend and her school, and she's a bad sport about all of it, and Cabot lets her be. She's wrong about who her real friends are. She's unkind before she's kind. The book doesn't hurry her past any of that. Your child gets to watch someone their own age lose the argument with a move and end up liking her life anyway, with no grown-up standing over her promising she'll adjust.