By Mary Casanova
A girl starts fourth grade at a new school, gets targeted by the clique that runs her class, and finally stops taking it.
Chrissa Maxwell starts at a new school partway through fourth grade, which is hard enough on its own, and the girls who run her class have already made up their minds about her. They call themselves the Mean Bees. It begins with the small, deniable things: a look, a laugh that cuts off when she comes near, a seat that's suddenly taken. Then it moves onto phones. Cruel texts about Chrissa get passed around, and rumors and pictures about her go up on a website where the whole school can see them and nobody can prove who posted them. Something happens at swim practice that leaves her hurt and humiliated, and she quits the team rather than go back. There's also Gwen, a quiet girl the Mean Bees have targeted far longer, who keeps Chrissa at a distance because she's ashamed of a secret at home. What finally shifts things is Sonali, one of the Mean Bees, who has gone along with all of it and can't anymore.
I'd hand this to an eight-to-eleven-year-old right at the start of all this: a first phone, a group chat, a class where the pecking order has just hardened. It's the youngest of these books to move online. Chrissa is an ordinary, slightly stubborn girl rather than a hero, and she doesn't fix everything with one clever speech. The real gift is Sonali. Plenty of children in a situation like this aren't the target and aren't the ringleader; they're the one laughing along and feeling sick about it, and Sonali is written for them. Casanova is also blunt that telling an adult helps, which counts for a lot in a book this young.