By Louise Fitzhugh
An eleven-year-old wants to be a writer, so she spies on everyone she knows and writes down the brutally honest truth, until her secret notebook falls into the wrong hands and her whole world turns on her.
Harriet M. Welsch is eleven, lives in New York, and plans to be a great writer. Her method is to spy: she follows a fixed route around her neighborhood, watches people through windows, and pours everything she sees into a secret notebook, along with her private, unsparing opinions about her classmates and friends. Then she loses the notebook at school. Her friends read exactly what she wrote about them, and one by one they turn against her, form a club to pay her back, and freeze her out. What starts as a spy game becomes the harder story of what honesty costs and how you find your way back after you've hurt people.
For a spy-obsessed child ready for a real novel, this is the classic that started the whole notebook-and-surveillance genre, and it holds up because Harriet is so alive: stubborn, funny, often wrong, completely herself. The spying is the fun way in, but the book is really about what happens when the private things you wrote get read, and how you rebuild a friendship you've damaged. That gives a thoughtful reader a lot to chew on, and it rewards the child who has outgrown lighter spy capers and wants a character who feels like a person.