Review: Best Friends by Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham

Picking up where Real Friends left off Best Friends sees Shannon starting sixth grade as a part of the in-crowd, and as the best friend of Jen, the most popular girl in the school. Unfortunately, sixth grade is still full of problems--among the group there are rules that seem to change constantly, and plenty of spying and backstabbing. Shannon finds herself caught between two worlds, of wanting to be loyal to the lessons she learned about being the good kind of popular kid, who lifts others up, and wanting to be loyal and accepted by her group of friends. Eventually, after some humiliating life lessons she finds herself at a crossroads. And maybe, just maybe this time she will be able to make the right decision.

This was an entertaining but heartbreaking graphic novel. Although intended for middle grade readers, plenty of adults will find Shannon's situation relatable as this sensitive pre-teen struggles against the tide of mental illness, changing friendships and peer group pressure. There are also some sections devoted to the book that Shannon was working on as an eleven year old--the story isn't that interesting, however, the fact that a young woman from a tight Mormon community who was more or less taught that women could only aspire to be school teachers or mothers, is pretty noteworthy in itself. (As is older sister Wendy's journey to work as a model in LA.) 

Best Friends is a great read for any kid who is experiencing uncertainties with changing friendships or peer group pressure. I found the ending empowering and I hope that other readers (especially ones in the target audience) do as well.

Highly recommended.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more