By John David Anderson
After phones are banned, a middle school runs on sticky notes, and the notes become a way to hurt people.
Branton Middle School bans cell phones, so Frost and his three closest friends — Deedee, Wolf, and Bench — start leaving each other sticky notes instead. The habit catches on until the whole school is papered in them, and for every funny or kind note there's a nasty one. Then a confident new girl named Rose sits down at their lunch table, and the group that felt permanent starts coming apart. The notes get meaner, and because nobody signs them, they can say the kind of thing a person can't take back. Frost is the one telling the story: a quiet boy who writes poems and ends up in the thick of it.
If your child has come up through the funnier, lighter middle-grade books, this is the one that turns toward something heavier while still sounding familiar. Frost narrates the way a sharp, funny friend would, so a reader who liked the diary-comic novels won't feel handed a Serious Book. Anderson just points that easygoing voice at real weight: how fast a friend group can turn, and how much a few words can do. Some children this age are in the middle of exactly this — a group shifting around, someone new at the table, the feeling of being talked about — and the book meets it without lecturing. It's also longer and slower than what comes before it on the trail, so it asks more of a reader.