bookshelves of doom: Molly McGinty Has a Really Good Day -- Gary Paulsen

Gary Paulsen has written about a billion books, mostly about boys. This is the fifth one with a female protagonist. If you're worried that she'll just be a girly version of Francis Tucket, don't. She isn't. She's actually a bit of a pill. But not in a bad way. And, of course, she gets better.

She lives with her creative-type grandmother. You know the kind I mean. Someone that forgets to pay the electric bill and then treats the two weeks of doing homework by candlelight as an indoor camping trip. Molly is, of course, the opposite. She might actually be the most organized character that I've ever read about. The key to her organization lies in her three-ring binder:

She kept her homework in the school section (every class in a different-colored folder, of course) along with a cross-referenced listing of test schedules and the due dates of large projects and important papers. She was especially proud of her system for keeping track of when to return library books, a structured grid laid out by date and time of day. Two years earlier she had been reading a book about the Wright brothers and their first flight at Kitty Hawk that contained an old photo showing the inside of the shack the men lived in while getting ready for the first powered flight. On the wall of the shack was a wooden rack full of eggs, which they ate for breakfast. The book said that each egg was numbered in order of freshness so that the oldest egg could be eaten first.

Molly had nearly cried; she understood the Wright brothers perfectly and knew, knew, that their organizational abilities were the primary reason there were airplanes today. The Wright brothers probably had three-ring binders.

But don't think that Molly's notebook only had information about classwork in it:

What if Jake somehow discovered that she had opened a subfile on him? Nothing at all that specific--for instances, she did not know his blood type yet, so the subfile was only half a page long and the information was, naturally, in code, so it wasn't likely that anyone would know what they were looking at should the notebook fall into the wrong hands, but Molly blushed to the roots of her hair at the thought of her Dempsey dossier.

As you might have gathered from the previous passage, Molly's major problem is that she's lost her notebook. This huge problem is compounded by the fact that today is Senior Citizens' Day at her school, and, of course, her grandmother is attending. Her grandmother is also the only senior citizen attending.

Because of her grandmother's attendance and her notebook's disappearance, Molly gets a black eye, a torn skirt, detention, a shirtful of spaghetti, and half a head of cornrows. She also learns some very interesting things about Sister Gloria, her chalk-throwing French teacher, meets Brenda (or Benet, as she would prefer to be called) the rogue braider who has a binder to rival Molly's, meets all of the school's scary kids when her grandmother gets caught smoking in the girls' bathroom, attends a poetry slam, and, of course, gets to actually talk with Jake Dempsey. (I have to admit that I actually preferred Tommy, the scary detention boy, but Molly's got to start somewhere, right?)

For some reason, this book is in our young adult section, but I think it should be in juvenile. Also, in the LIC summary, it says that Molly is a seventh-grader, when the book itself says that she's in sixth. What's up with that? Somebody deserves a beat-down.

Anyway. Recommend it to girls that have finished all of the Judy Moody books.