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Booki Vivat’s Frazzled: One Girl’s Quest to Survive Middle School
“Nothing to worry about.”
“Your whole life is about to begin.”
“Just be yourself.”
These are the words of advice doled out to Abbie Wu in the days leading up to her first day of middle school. But Abbie knows better. After all, it’s called middle school. And everybody knows, nothing good happens when you’re in The Middle.
In Frazzled: Everyday Disasters and Impending Doom, the reader dives headlong into Abbie’s world, through a novel heavily illustrated in journal, doodle-like style. Abbie knows all about The Middle. Her older brother, Peter, is the perfect child, good at everything. Her younger sister, Clara, is cute, and gets away with whatever she wants. Abbie is just Abbie. Sure, maybe someday she’ll be famous and everybody will know her name. But for now she’s just stuck-in-the-middle Abbie. Not really good at anything. Nothing special. And maybe that’s the worst part about middle school. In middle school, you have to choose an elective. This is easy for Abbie’s best friends, Maxine and Logan. Maxine has wanted to be an actress since she was in third grade, so for her, drama is the perfect fit. Logan is a genius who loves taking apart computer games to see how they work, so picking a coding class as his elective is a no-brainer. But Abbie doesn’t have a Thing. She’s not good at computers, or acting, or sports. That’s how she ends up in study hall. The no-man’s land of middle school electives.
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At first, middle school is exactly what Abbie expects. She gets the worst homeroom teacher in the whole school, the one everybody calls Ms. Skeletor. To make matters worse, not only is Skeletor in charge of homeroom, she’s in charge of study hall, too. But worse than Skeletor, worse than the older, evil, rule-the-school Spencer sisters, worse than living in her brother’s shadow, and even worse than study hall is lunch.
Lunch was actually the one thing about middle school Abbie was looking forward to. Goodbye, rubbery pizza sqaures, soggy sandwiches, or whatever weird stuff your parents packed for you. In middle, school, it was rumored, there was burgers with fries, chicken nuggets with sauce, even candy and chips and soda. REAL food! Except there’s a line for eighth graders only, and guess where all that real food is? Yup. If you’re a sixth or seventh grader, it’s back to soggy sandwiches, stale bread, and rubber meat.
So I guess you could say that for Abbie Wu, middle school is going exactly as middle school should. Until one day in study hall, a single embarrassing event sparks a revolution. A lunchtime revolution. As with most things, it starts small. A single person. A single idea. Then that idea is shared with a few others and it grows. Then those few others organize, and spread the word, and soon that idea has caught on and the whole school knows…including Principal Kline.
Packed with humor and middle school drama (the kind the adult reader is so happy to have left behind), Frazzled is, at its heart, a story about searching for your place in a bigger world, about finding your voice, and about using that voice for change. And about learning how sometimes, that change looks different than you might expect.
Frazzled is on B&N shelves now.