Amelia's Middle School Survival Guide by Marissa Moss

Classic: Marvelous Middle Grade 

Monday Review

Gram's Approved! See my
review to see why.

Published: June 23, 2009 

ISBN: 1416979875

Genre: Middle Grade, realistic fiction, humorous fiction
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Themes: middle school, friends, sisters, family
Add it on: Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes And Noble/ *Indie Bound*

About The Book: Nothing says middle school better than embarrassing moments and gossip. And no one is better at capturing the middle school experience than Marissa Moss’s Amelia. Now two bestselling classic Amelia books, Amelia’s Most Unforgettable Embarrassing Moments and Amelia’s Guide to Gossip, are together in a value-priced bind-up with a special Amelia eraser key chain. This is the perfect summer reading for middle schoolers and middle-schoolers-to-be.

First Line: (This is a notebook, you can start anywhere.)

Here's One Of My Favorite: "Only Cleo could say that about eggs that were either runny or rubbery—either way completely gross."

Kid Review: "Each page is colorfully illustrated with hilarious images and word bubbles relating to each rule, hint, and tip. Though it’s meant to be a humorous book it also gave me true tips for surviving class. What I loved most about it is the vast vocabulary. I learned MANY new words and how to use them in day to day life. All Moss’s books are great for an elementary school child yearning to soak up new words and tips for school and life." —Ayesha Reviews

Parent Review: "Moss understands how kids think and remembers what it is like to be a kid. At the same time, she has a remarkable ability to step into her stories, either in the form of older sister Cleo, a parent or another kid who just happens to have a flash of wisdom and good advice, and help Amelia through her problems, showing her how to fix things on her own rather than doing it for her. To me, that is the best kind of parenting and teaching you can find and I am happy to have Marissa Moss here to teach my kids a thing or two."—Book 4 Your Kids

What I Thought: As a grandma, I'm always trying to find ways to inspire my grandchildren to read and write. My granddaughter is beginning middle school so a survival guide is exactly what she needs. Middle School is the perfect time to begin writing a journal. She also loves to draw and I wanted to show her how a journal could be illustrated, too. 

    The Amelia Notebook series is a great introduction to keeping a journal or writing/art notebook. I know my journal got me through some really tough middle school days. Like the time a couple of tough girls followed me home, making fun of my clothes then knocking the books out of my hands. That night I carefully sketched out a plan: A map to walk home a different way each day for the rest of the week. 
     A sample teachers lesson used this series to inspire writing in their students. See that here.

Photo credit: David Toerge

About The Author and Illustrator: Marissa Moss

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Who: "I’ve been making children’s books for a looooong time. I sent my first picture book to publishers when I was nine, but it wasn’t very good and they didn’t publish it. I didn’t try again until I was a grown-up and then it took five years of sending out stories, getting them rejected, revising them and sending them back over and over until I got my first book. Now I’ve published more than forty books and each new one is still hard in its own way. Each one takes a lot of revising because I never get things right the first time. That used to frustrate me. Now I expect it. And I don’t mind, because that gives me permission to make mistakes. It means I can take risks and try new things because I don’t have to be perfect - I can always make changes." —Marissa Moss

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Keeping notebooks is just plain fun! Here's one I just started for my new birding hobby.

What kind of notebooks do you keep?

MMGM: Dead End In Norvelt by Jack Gantos [Audio Version]

About the Book: Dead End in Norvelt is the winner of the 2012 Newbery Medal for the year's best contribution to children's literature and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction! 

Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is "grounded for life" by his feuding parents, and whose nose spews bad blood at every little shock he gets. But plenty of excitement (and shocks) are coming Jack's way once his mom loans him out to help a feisty old neighbor with a most unusual chore—typewriting obituaries filled with stories about the people who founded his utopian town. As one obituary leads to another, Jack is launched on a strange adventure involving molten wax, Eleanor Roosevelt, twisted promises, a homemade airplane, Girl Scout cookies, a man on a trike, a dancing plague, voices from the past, Hells Angels . . . and possibly murder. Endlessly surprising, this sly, sharp-edged narrative is the author at his very best, making readers laugh out loud at the most unexpected things in a dead-funny depiction of growing up in a slightly off-kilter place where the past is present, the present is confusing, and the future is completely up in the air.

First Line: School was finally out and I was standing on a picnic table in our backyard getting ready for a great summer vacation when my mother walked up to me and ruined it.

  

One Great Line: “...who proved that you don't have to do what your parents want, or what your boyfriend wants, for you to be happy. You just have to be yourself, for there is no love greater than self love”

What Others Are Saying: “This is a brilliant book, full of history, mystery, and laughs. It reminded me of my small-town childhood, although my small town was never as delightfully weird as Norvelt.” —Dave Barry

“A bit of autobiography works its way into all of Gantos’s work, but he one-ups himself in this wildly entertaining meld of truth and fiction by naming the main character… Jack Gantos.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Awards:Newbery Medal (2012), Scott O'Dell Award (2012), Boston Author's Club Young Reader Award Nominee (2012)

What I Thought: The minute I heard Jack Gantos reading his own story I was hooked. It is always interesting to listen to an author read their own work. The descriptions were colorful and incredibly visceral. "...still dazed and bleeding and completely motionless, except for the steady drops of blood ticking off seconds against the dry summer grass."(320) is just one of the lines that bring you to the front and center stage of action. Gantos is adept in presenting bits and pieces of history in snappy, immediately interesting blurbs that foster interest in further research. His voice drips off the page but hearing it gave a certain edge to this semi-autobiographical tale. A great read-aloud with many points that inspire discussion.

About The Author: Jack Gantos
Website

Who: "Jack was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the nearby town of Norvelt. He remembers playing a lot of “pass the chalk” in Mrs. Neiderheizer’s class in first grade. He was in the Bluebird reading group, which he later found out was for the slow readers. To this day he’d rather be called a Bluebird than a slow reader. His favorite game at that time was playing his clothes were on fire and rolling down a hill to save himself.

When he was seven, his family moved to Barbados. He attended British schools, where there was much emphasis on reading and writing. Students were friendly but fiercely competitive, and the teachers made learning a lot of fun. By fifth grade he had managed to learn 90 percent of what he knows to this very day." —Jack Gantos Website

When: "The seeds for Jack’s writing career were planted in sixth grade, when he read his sister’s diary and decided he could write better than she could. He begged his mother for a diary and began to collect anecdotes he overheard at school, mostly from standing outside the teachers’ lounge and listening to their lunchtime conversations. Later, he incorporated many of these anecdotes into stories." —Jack Gantos Website

Jack Gantos' desk, with journals at the ready.   

Why: Talking about his sister, Gantos says, "When she left the house I did read her diary. It was an awful, unethical thing to do, but I was compelled. I read it, and it wasn’t terribly interesting to me. I’m not trying to run my sister down, but it seemed to me that she was missing all the good stuff of life—the juicy stuff. Here we were moving from western Pennsylvania to Cape Hatteras to Barbados to St. Lucia to Miami—you know, there was a lot going on! We were bouncing from one neighborhood to another and they all were filled with crazy characters who did the wildest things—but none of that stuff made the diary."I thought, "That’s really peculiar, because the world I’m living with and in is really interesting.” So I got my little red diary and got started." —Jack Gantos Website

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