The Second Life of Abigail Walker (review)

"Sixth grade is no time to go off on your own, pretending like having friends didn't matter." Which is why Abby, lost after her best friend moved away, resignedly panders to Kristen the bully until one day she can't take it any more and openly disagrees with her, immediately becomes the designated target of Kristen and her henchgirls. It's not all bad, however: Abby, having suffered her most feared consequence, starts taking more chances. She makes new friends in school and she becomes close with a family on the edge of town that's struggling with its own problems. Dowell remains one of our preeminent observers of young girls negotiating growth and change, and her attention to preadolescent dynamics remains keen and perceptive; she varies effectively between clearly articulating some hard-won concepts ("It wasn't fair that Abby had to pretend things were nice all the time") and leaving others tacit (Abby's new school friends are all comfortably outsiders themselves). Abby's growing relationship with the farm family works effectively to demonstrate that there's more going on in the world than the concerns of a couple of mean eleven-year-olds. The presence of a fox, whose viewpoint the book occasionally follows, and whose acknowledged role is that of story catalyst, offers a slightly supernatural element, but this is really the tale of a girl's working her way through a paradigm shift about daily life. It's refreshing to see a literary solution that's not beating or reforming the mean girls but instead expanding your world so they don't matter, and Abby's openness to new possibilities could certainly inspire discussion.