Pish Posh, by Ellen Potter
Yesterday Ponytails started telling me about a book she had borrowed from her school library. Usually I don't get too interested in those things with covers that pass for pre-teen chapter books, but this one sounded a bit different, and I ended up reading it.
Don't read the customer reviews on Amazon if you're planning on reading the book--they give away too much. You can read the blurb on Potter's website, though, and the School Library Journal and Booklist reviews on the Amazon page. Pay attention to the SLJ review, especially if you have sensitive readers. There is a bit of gruesomeness towards the end, a stream of violent (although nonsensical, not-meant-seriously) threats by a bad-tempered chef, and also a storyline about hypnosis than some people might not like. Preview before handing to a tween.
Why bother reading this book then? Why I'd even bother mentioning it here?
Because it's just a better story than most. It's not about malls and shopping. It's not about boys. It's actually a story--a weird story with bizarre characters, but still a story, and an imaginative one, reminiscent of Ellen Raskin's fantasy-mystery-satire books ("things are not what they seem, people are not who they say they are") (The Westing Game, The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues, Figgs and Phantoms, The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel)). Or E.L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. If Clara has her share of angst, it's not without just cause: she's grown up in a kind of magic goldfish bowl created by her parents' anxieties and secrets--a sort of eleven-year-long Westing Game. She's definitely a snob, she may be spoiled, but she does have guts and resourcefulness. There's enough to like about Clara--and the other characters, even her father-- to make this fantasy more realistic, and enjoyable, than some of the "realistic" tween novels. There's also some fun computer stuff.
Worth checking out.
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