{Synopsis} – When Claire’s best friend, Bess, moves away, she becomes the only girl left in her entire school. At first, she thinks she’ll be able to deal with this — after all, the girls’ bathroom is now completely hers, so she can turn it into her own private headquarters and draw on the walls. When it comes to soccer games or sailing races, she can face off against any boy.
The problem is that her other best friend, Henry, has begun to ignore her. And Webby, a super-annoying bully, won’t leave her alone. And Yucky Gilbert, the boy who has a crush on her, also won’t leave her alone.
It’s never easy being the only one — and over the course of a wacky school year, Claire is going to have to make it through challenges big and small. The boys may think they rule the school, but when it comes to thinking on your feet, Claire’s got them outnumbered.
{My thoughts} – Some of the best books I have read have been written in a diary/ letter style. Claire begins by writing a letter to her friend Bess that moved to California. Each chapter is a new letter that she writes to her friend.
I enjoyed getting to learn Claire and her personality. I also liked how the boys in the story were so different from her that it made sense they would all clash. How could they not? Claire ends up being the only girl in her entire school this year, she wouldn’t have been alone except that Bess had moved. The things that happen when you are the only girl in school can become unreal. Some of the boys that were her friends, stopped being her friends, others started to treat her worse and worse.
Why do you think the boys were treating her so different? What kind of feelings do you think she would have been dealing with? Do you think that it’s really possible she’d be the only girl in her school? Is she the only young girl mentioned in the entire book? Are the perks to being the only girl in school? So many questions and they all get answered as your reading the book.
I think that any child would enjoy this book. It has an interesting take on what would happen if one would find themselves as the only girl in school. Claire had a lot of ups and downs within the book and I think that the ways in which she handled situations was appropriate for her age. I do wish that she would have been more open with her teachers but seeing it from a child’s point of view you can understand why she wasn’t as open as she could have been.
I didn’t like how the book started as a letter Claire was writing to Bess and then in a few it had her replying to some of Bess’ letters. I don’t understand why it is like that in the beginning of the book, but it didn’t stay that way throughout the book. I think had it stayed that way it would have made the book a bit more interesting. However, if it weren’t going to stay that way maybe it shouldn’t have started that way? I don’t know for sure.
Final Conclusion: 5 Star Rating.
