By Svetlana Chmakova
A full-color comic about a middle-school girl who shoves the wrong boy on her first day and spends the whole year too embarrassed to apologize.
Peppi Torres trips on her first day at Berrybrook Middle School and drops everything she's carrying. A boy named Jaime crouches down to help her, some children start chanting about the two of them, and Peppi panics. She shoves him, calls him a nerder, and runs. She spends the rest of the book knowing exactly what she did and being far too mortified to say sorry. Meanwhile she's found the art club and her people, Jaime turns out to be in the science club, the two clubs go to war over a table at the school fair, and Peppi ends up the one person who could actually call a truce.
It's easy to sell as the next Dork Diaries, and for the friendship trouble and the club politics, that's fair. The real difference is the format. No diary, no doodles in the margins, just full-color comic panels the whole way through, which makes it read a bit older than the rest of these books. So for a child who loved Nikki Maxwell's world more than her handwriting, this is the better book, and a good step up when the diary style starts to feel young.