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Make a Wish, Molly

Make a Wish, Molly by Barbara Cohen, 1994.

This book is the sequel to Molly’s Pilgrim.

Things have improved for Molly in Winter Hill since she and Emma became friends.  Now, Molly doesn’t feel quite so alone as she once did.  However, Emma is still friends with the nasty Elizabeth (resident mean girl from the first book).  Molly has learned that a major part of Elizabeth’s resentment toward her is that Elizabeth is used to being the teacher’s pet and the center of attention at school.  In both first and second grade, she always seemed to be the favorite student.  Now, in the third grade, Elizabeth thinks that their teacher prefers Molly, and she can’t stand it.  So, she tries to make trouble for Molly whenever she can and make others not like her, too.

Emma tries to ignore Elizabeth’s nastiness and invites both girls to her birthday party.  Molly is excited because she’s never been to a birthday party in America before, and birthdays are celebrated very differently in America from the way they were in Russia.  Emma and Elizabeth (in her condescending way) explain how birthday parties are, that the birthday girl receives presents from her friends and gives them small party favors in return, and that there is cake and ice cream for everyone.  Molly has never had a cake like the ones that the girls look at in the bakery window and is eager to try it.  But, there’s a problem.

Molly’s mother says that it’s fine for her to go to the party and is willing to make some doll clothes for Emma’s birthday present, but she says that Molly cannot try the cake because the party will take place during Passover, and Jewish families like theirs cannot eat leavened foods during that time. Leavened foods are those that include rising agents, like yeast, baking powder, and baking soda, which includes cakes and breads. For Passover, Molly and her family are limited to things which don’t have these ingredients.

Instead, Molly’s mother packs a snack for Molly to take and eat while the others have the cake.  At first, Molly thinks maybe she could disobey her mother just this once and try the cake anyway without her noticing and without feeling different among the other girls, but when a piece of cake is placed in front of her at the party, she can’t bring herself to eat it.

Of course, Elizabeth takes advantage of Molly’s inability to eat the cake to make her feel bad and look bad in front of the others.  Elizabeth says that Jewish people don’t like to eat in Christian homes.  Molly tries to explain that isn’t the problem and to tell them about Passover, but Elizabeth ignores her explanation and just says that Molly’s reluctance to eat proves that what her mother told her about Jews was true.  (Let me just say that when a kid is as awful as Elizabeth is routinely, I always assume that the parents are exactly the same way.  I decided that Elizabeth’s mother was probably a bully and a snob back in the first book, so hearing that she’s been spewing anti-Semitic comments is no more than what I would have expected.  I view this type of behavior as an off-shoot of a bullying mindset, so I would completely expect that a person who is prone to one type of bullying would also engage in another. The apples never fall far from the tree.)  Molly knows that she can’t make the other kids understand the situation, so she just leaves in embarrassment.

When she gets home, Molly tells her mother about what happened.  Her mother says that everyone is a little different from other people, and there’s no use in pretending that they don’t live different types of lives from some of their neighbors.  However, Molly also has a birthday coming soon, and Molly’s mother thinks that if they invite some of the girls from Emma’s party to their house for a celebration, they will see that Molly’s family isn’t quite as different as they might think.

At first, Molly isn’t sure that it will be such a good idea, but it turns out better than she expects.  Her birthday is full of wonderful surprises.  There’s no cake, but Molly’s mother bakes other wonderful goodies, like rugelach (pastries with apples, raisins, and nuts).  Emma and another girl, Fay, try them and like them, but Elizabeth still refuses.  She also just looks defiant when Molly’s mother proves to her that Jews will wash and reuse plates that Christians have eaten from, not throw them away, like Elizabeth’s mother said before.  Once again, the issue with Elizabeth isn’t how correct or incorrect she (or her mother) was in whatever she said but whether or not she happens to look better than someone else at the current moment.  All Molly’s mother’s demonstration means to her is that she just lost another opportunity to look better than someone, and that annoys her.  But, Molly doesn’t care so much about Elizabeth’s lingering nastiness at that point because she knows that Emma is still her friend and Fay has just become a new friend.

There is also a movie version of this book, although the story was altered slightly so that the girl who insults Molly at the party says that it was her aunt who told her all the bad stuff about Jews, not her mother.  Also, the movie takes place in a time contemporary with when it was made.  The original book takes place in the past, judging by why the reasons why Molly’s family had to leave Russia and the clothes that the girls wear in the pictures.

Posted on by TracyC

Queen of the Sixth Grade

QueenSixthGradeQueen of the Sixth Grade by Ilene Cooper, 1988.

This is part of The Kids From Kennedy Middle School series.

Robin Miller has been best friends with Veronica for years, although it hasn’t always been the easiest friendship. Veronica can be exciting. She gets lots of interesting ideas and her apparent confidence in herself can be contagious. Unfortunately, she isn’t really a nice person, not even to her closest friends. She likes to call Robin “Curly” because of her hair, which Robin hates, but she tolerates the nickname for Veronica’s sake. The way Veronica teases and bullies other people makes Robin uncomfortable, too, but Robin hesitates to speak up about it both for the sake of maintaining her friendship with Veronica and because she doesn’t want to get on Veronica’s bad side herself. However, now that the girls are in sixth grade, things are about to change.

Veronica has decided to start a kind of club with some of the girls in their class called the Awesome Kennedy Girls (or AKG for short). Of course, Robin is a member. Veronica chooses the other members herself from the girls in the class that she thinks are the coolest, at least by her standards.

Then, Veronica tells Robin that she has a crush on Jonathan Rossi, a cute boy in their class. Robin likes him herself. In fact, she’s had a serious crush on him for some time, although she’s never told Veronica about it. It’s been Robin’s good fortune that she and Jonathan have been assigned to be partners for an oral book report in class. While working on the project together, Robin and Jonathan discover that they have some interests in common and start becoming friends. However, somewhat like the love triangle in Cyrano de Bergerac, Veronica asks Robin to use her influence with Jonathan to tell him that Veronica likes him and wants him to be her date for the Halloween party she’s planning. Because she always does what Veronica wants, Robin does attempt to do so, even though it pains her. But, Jonathan really likes Robin and misunderstands what Robin is saying, agreeing to be Robin’s date for the party. That’s when Robin’s real problems begin.

Veronica is used to getting what she wants and having people do thing her way. Instead of accepting Jonathan’s decision that he likes Robin completely on his own, she decides that Robin has “stolen” Jonathan from her. Immediately, Robin goes from being Veronica’s best friend to her worst enemy. Worse still, Veronica starts spreading terrible rumors about Robin to the other girls in class. Soon, no one in class wants to be friends with Robin, and the other girls in the AKG go out of their way to make life miserable for her with their bullying.

At one point in the story, Robin remembers back to when she and Veronica first became friends in the third grade. Before she met Veronica, she was friends with Gretchen, a fat girl who is now one of Veronica’s favorite people to bully. While Robin is on the outs with Veronica and shunned by most of the rest of the girls in class, she tries to become Gretchen’s friend again out of loneliness, but to her surprise and shame, Gretchen tells her that she is no longer interested in her friendship. Gretchen correctly realizes that Robin is still too much attached to Veronica and the way she does things. There were many times when she could have stood up to Veronica and defended Gretchen, but she chose not to. Gretchen points out to Robin that if Veronica decided that she wanted to be friends with her again, she’d be off like a shot after Veronica, dropping Gretchen and forgetting all about her like she did when they were younger. Robin is ashamed when she realizes that everything Gretchen says is true. In becoming friends with Veronica, Robin lost part of the nice person she used to be. Although she is not as mean as Veronica, Robin isn’t completely nice and, in some ways, has become rather shallow. If getting dumped and bullied by a former best friend hurts, it hurts even more when Robin realizes that she partly deserves it because of the kind of person she’s been and the type friendships she’s chosen.

However, there is hope for Robin in realizing the mistakes she’s made. She comes to admire Gretchen for her ability to put up with the bullying she’s endured and for continuing to stand on her own, not come crawling to the first person who offers her friendship. Gretchen is sometimes lonely and she did once fall for a trick of Veronica’s when she pretended to offer her a place in the AKG, but Gretchen still respects herself, in spite of the bullying she’s endured. In a way, she has better self-esteem than Robin does. Gretchen has her problems, but she doesn’t define herself solely by her relationships with other people, like Robin does at first. When Gretchen can’t find friends who appreciate her, she simply does the best she can without them, pursuing her own interests by herself. In a way, that attitude becomes the solution to Robin’s problems. At her mother’s urging, Robin begins pursing new interests in life.

Robin’s mother correctly points out that Robin needs to develop her own interests for her own sake and to look for friendship beyond her cramped little circle of “cool” kids. There are many other options for good friends around her, but Robin has been stuck in a mindset that hasn’t allowed her to see them. By getting out, finding new interests, and learning to be her own person again after spending the last few years mainly being Veronica’s sidekick/puppet, Robin develops new confidence and new insights on herself and the people around her.

Robin is successful at finding new friends when she takes a drama class. She even connects with another girl from her school who was neither part of the in-crowd nor the bullied ones in her class, Sharon. For a time, Robin still feels badly about what happened to her friendship with Veronica, but the more time they spend apart, the less Robin misses her and the more she begins to see Veronica, her behavior, and the problems in Veronica’s life for what they are. In the process, she begins to recover a bit of her old self, the nicer, freer person she was before she became Veronica’s friend.

When a drama project allows Robin to meet a celebrity, she becomes something of a celebrity in her class. Suddenly, people who had shunned her before are anxious to be her friend again, making Robin feel awkward because she knows their motives are self-serving, not honest or sincere. At the same time, Veronica’s controlling behavior and the one-upmanship she encouraged in her little club backfire on her. The other girls get fed up with her behavior, and Veronica is put in the uncomfortable position of appealing to Robin for help. With her former best friend and tormentor at her mercy, Robin has to decide if she will use the opportunity to take revenge or if she will go forward with her efforts to be a better person and use her new popularity for good instead of evil. There is power in popularity, but there is also power in knowing who you are and what you really stand for.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.  I’d also like to give special kudos to this book for mentioning other books that Robin likes, including Where the Wild Things Are, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and The Westing Game (the book Robin and Jonathan use for their book report, which they both like).

Posted on by TracyC

Eagle-Eye Ernie Comes to Town

eeetownEagle-Eye Ernie Comes to Town by Susan Pearson, 1990.

Ernestine Jones, better known as Ernie, is upset because her family has moved from Newport News, Virginia to White Bear Lake, Minnesota. She has no friends at school, and the other kids all think she’s strange and that she talks funny because of her southern accent.

Worse yet, someone has recently started stealing things from people’s lunches at school, and some of the kids think that Ernie might be the thief. Ernie has a knack for finding things, and her father says that she has an eagle eye. To save her reputation and any chance she might have of making friends, Ernie needs to use her eagle eye to find the thief so everyone will stop blaming her.

Ernie not only figures out who the real thief is but even helps the person find a solution to a bigger problem.

This is the first book in the Eagle-Eye Ernie series. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

The books are easy, beginning chapter books. The series starts with Ernie moving to her new town and making some new friends. These friends, William, Michael, and R.T. (Rachel) end up calling themselves the Martians because Michael is interested in outer space and likes calling everyone a Martian.

One of the cute parts of this book was when Ernie painted her saddle shoes to look like little bears in honor of “White Bear Lake.”  For a long time, this was the part of the story that I remembered best.