By Terri Libenson
A shy girl and a popular girl, one seventh-grade day, and a private note Emmie wrote about her crush that gets read out loud at school.
Emmie is quiet and artistic and pretty sure she's invisible, the girl who feels like she vanishes in a crowded hallway. Katie is her opposite: confident, popular, good at pretty much everything. The book runs their two days side by side, half in Emmie's doodled diary and half in comic panels, and it's all building toward the thing Emmie dreads most. She wrote a private note about a boy she likes, and it gets loose and read out loud at school. There's a twist near the end too, the kind that sends you flipping back to page one to see how it was done.
If your child ever feels overlooked, Emmie will land hard: here's a girl who feels exactly that invisible, told in a fast, funny, doodle-packed format that never gets heavy. The note plot is a real middle-school nightmare, so the stakes feel true. And the twist genuinely surprises, which is what sends a child straight back through the book to catch what they missed. It reads quickly, it looks easy in a way that reassures a reluctant reader while still telling a real story, and it opens right into a popular series if they want more.