Click Here (To Find Out How I Survived Seventh Grade) (review)

Since Erin is a nascent computer geek and the daughter of a web designer, it's perfectly logical that her diary should take the form of an unpublished website. Since she has always been in the shadow of the controlling, popular Jillian, it's also logical that Erin would start having second thoughts about their friendship when she enters junior high and finds herself separated from Jillian for the first time. Junior high gets off to an inauspicious start when Erin decks bad-girl Serena for calling her Jillian's puppet; she recovers, however, and even begins to enjoy new friendships with the kids in her "track," especially a cute boy named Mark and his friend from elementary school, Rosie. Her blog becomes the repository of all of her anxieties about separating from Jilly, crushing on Mark, hating Serena, etc., and, of course, circumstances conspire so that the whole thing ends up being published on the school's intranet. In the alternating blog segments and live-action narration, Erin's voice is consistently fresh and funny, and the secondary characters are well rounded, even including the school janitor, who offers Erin the wisdom that "friends are like Tootsie Pops, they last a long time if you don't bite them." Vega does an especially nice job of showing the developing friendship between Mark and Erin, which outlasts both Erin's crush and Mark's whirlwind romance with Jilly, and of describing the typically troubled but ultimately supportive and loving relationship between Erin and her older brother. Of the recent spate of Harriet the Spy remakes in the age of computers (see Goldschmidt's The Secret Blog of Raisin Rodriguez, BCCB 5/05, and Hughes' I Am the Wallpaper, reviewed above), this is both the wisest and the most compulsively readable.