The Friendship List meets To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before in this middle-grade novel about a girl who attempts to get over the worst BFF break-up ever by revisiting her top five friENDships to see if she can learn from past mistakes or if she’s doomed to be friendless 4ever.
DEAR FRIENDS
by Lisa Greenwald
HarperCollins Children’s Books, April 2022
When Eleni comes home from a lonely summer at camp only to get dumped by her BFF since kindergarten, she figures there’s got to be something wrong with her. Who loses two friends in span of a couple of months? So, she sets out to revisit her top five “friendship fails” in an attempt to figure out where she went wrong and what makes a good friend.
Along the way, Eleni reconnects with her across-the-street neighbor, a friend-turned-mean-girl from Hebrew school, and a friend who moved away in Pre-K, all while building new friendships in surprising ways. But will she ever truly work through the burn of losing her BFF?
In the vein of High Fidelity and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Lisa Greenwald uses her exceptional skills at capturing tween social dynamics to explore the ins and outs of friendship in a humorous and insightful novel that affirms that we are all innately capable and worthy of 4ever friendship.
Lisa Greenwald is the author of the Friendship List, TBH, and the Pink & Green series. She works in the library at the Birch Wathen Lenox School in Manhattan, is a graduate of The New School’s MFA program in writing for children, and lives on the Upper East Side with her husband and two kids.
Yolanda Cicerón has big dreams. One day she’s going to become the scientist who gives Silo – the most connected and advanced town in the Valley – the technology the world lost. But as she and her older sister Cami struggle to maintain their family farm that dream floats farther away. With relentless storms across the country, hurricanes on the coast, freezes bearing down from the north, depending on fickle nature for a good harvest is getting Yoly nowhere fast. And when she discovers that they can no longer afford her ticket out of farm life, she decides to take matters into her own hands.
It’s the start of the summer holidays and eleven-year-old Bertie is worried. Next year she’s going to a high school in the city, while all her friends stay behind in Merri, the small town she’s lived in all her life. To help her feel better prepared for high school, her best friend, Claire, makes a list of eleven tasks Bertie has to complete over the summer. They start working through the list together, but the tasks begin to reveal some of the cracks in their friendship. Now Bertie’s not even sure she’ll have one friend by the end of the summer.
There’s a new girl in town. Holly-Mei Jones is excited about moving to Hong Kong for her mother’s job. Her new school is right on the beach and her family’s apartment is beyond beautiful. Everything is going to be perfect . . . right? Maybe not. It feels like everywhere she turns, there are new rules to follow and expectations to meet. On top of that, the most popular girl in her grade is quickly becoming a frenemy. And without the guidance of her loving Ah-ma, who stayed behind in Toronto, Holly-Mei just can’t seem to get it right. It will take all of Holly-Mei’s determination and sparkle (and maybe even a tiny bit of stubbornness) to get through seventh grade and turn her life in Hong Kong into a great adventure!
All her life, eleven-year-old Farrah Noorzad has been desperate to make her father proud. But she only gets one day a year—her birthday—to spend time with him, before he jets back across the world to his real family in Abu Dhabi. This year, when her father gives her a box containing a mysterious, whispering ring, and tells her she can make a wish on it, Farrah doesn’t think twice. She takes the ring and wishes with everything in her heart to find a place in his world. But her wish backfires and her father vanishes before her eyes. Guided by the whispering ring, she meets Idris, a half-jinn with milky white eyes and hair, who reveals her true heritage: she is also a half-jinn…and her father is one of the seven great jinn kings. As if that weren’t unbelievable enough, he explains that her wish has trapped her father inside the ring, and the other six jinn kings will follow if she can’t find a way to undo her mistake.