By Rebecca Stead
Three seventh-grade friends who swore never to fight, and the photo one of them sends that gets away from her.
Bridge, Emily, and Tab have a rule: no fighting, ever. It's held since second grade. Then seventh grade arrives and starts pulling. Emily's body changed over the summer and an older boy on the soccer team has noticed, and the flirting by text is thrilling until she sends him a photo of herself in her bra. He shares it. By Monday it's everywhere, and it's Emily the school decides to punish for it, not him. Bridge is working out who she is since the accident that nearly killed her when she was eight, and why she wears cat ears now, and what it means that Sherm keeps waiting for her. Tab has found feminism and a teacher worth following and won't shut up about either. Threaded through it all is a fourth voice, an unnamed girl on Valentine's Day skipping school and walking the city, who has done something to a friend she can't undo, and you don't learn who she is until the end.
Stead does the hardest thing on this shelf: she refuses to give you a villain. The boy who shares Emily's photo isn't a monster, he's a boy. The school that turns on her isn't a mob, it's everyone your child sits next to. Even the girl who does the worst thing in the book gets the whole last stretch to explain herself, and she isn't wrong about how lonely she was. That's why this is the one for a 12-or-13-year-old who is right in the middle of all this and would slam shut on anything that felt like a lesson. It reads as a friendship story and a puzzle. It's also the only book here that gets at the thing parents most dread, a photo that can't be recalled, and gets at it without shaming the girl who sent it.