Boys, Girls, and Other Hazardous Materials (review)

Middle school was tough for Charlie Healey—her two best friends turned out to be treacherous frenemies—so she decided it was time for a clean break. Now entering ninth grade at a different school, she finds new friends in Michael and Sydney, and a few old ones: a guy named Will, who was her best friend from the time they were tots until he moved three years ago, and a girl, Nidhi, who was another victim of Charlie's frenemies' middle-school meanness—while Charlie was still part of their pack. She quickly makes up with Nidhi, and the entire group of friends navigates the ups and downs of freshman year in a school where competition is intense. The lacrosse team is especially vicious, and when the hazing of freshmen presumptuous enough to try out for varsity turns dangerous, the friendship between Charlie and Will reaches a crisis. In her first foray into fiction, Wiseman (the author of Queen Bees & Wannabes, on which the movie Mean Girls was based) succeeds in delivering realistic, likable characters whose challenges and mistakes are all too relatable. The ensemble cast is multicultural in a natural, unforced way, and simple things like gesture and casual touch are portrayed with easy grace. There is a plausibility flaw in the resolution as the fate of an important character is left without mention, but that omission isn't enough to mar the sense of a solidly realized, compellingly readable contemporary school story.