Jessica’s best friend Natalie has gone off with fashionable but hateful new girl Amelia. Jessica does her best to deal with this horrendous turn of events but finds it increasingly difficult, not least because the terrible two are in her form at school and also because they flaunt their new friendship in ever more public but exclusive ways.
One such outrage is their formation of a gang, CAC, whose unfortunate name does little to wean Jess off her obsession with her ex-best friend (or is she?) and the vile interloper who looks at Jess as if she is ‘a carpet stain’. The book is full of splendid images like that and narrated by Jess in the convincing voice of a girl who is as much on the border between youth and young adulthood as she is on the fence about liking and disliking the treacherous Natalie.
Jess decides to start her own gang (ACE!) and recruits friends from the chess club who, hilariously, are invariably at some other club or wholesome activity when Jess wants to get them all together to do… Well, one of the problems faced by Jess is what you actually do when you’ve got a gang. She ends up trying to copy Natalie and Amelia but it all goes predictably wrong.
Fortunately, Jess has tough girl Tanya Harris as ACE’s ‘gang enforcer’ (Tanya’s idea), although this advantage proves to be ambiguous, not least when Tanya photocopies Jess’s cartoon depicting their school as hell and gives copies to everyone. CAC counter by making their own badges - one of them has a badge maker - and Jess’s pleas to her mother to buy one fall on deaf ears as the family is on an ‘economy drive’ and thus forced to eat all the boring stuff in the freezer before any more decent grub is purchased. The whole badge maker ‘cold war’ is really funny, especially when Jess improvises and sticks her own cartoons over existing badges lying around the house. She calls her cartooning skills her superpower, to which Amelia responds, “Well, it’s lucky you can do that, because you certainly can’t dress yourself.” Ouch!
The author really nails the scattershot internal voice of her young protagonist. Despite the intense emotion, bitchiness and cunning; for all the ubiquity of such contemporary phenomena as social media and Sky Plus, there is also a bemused clear-sightedness and compassion in Jess that maker her a timeless Everygirl. This is a great fun novel that delivers a gentle message about perseverance and sticking to your principles, even when you don’t want to.
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Book Damaged
Delivered quickly but one of the pages is ripped, bit disappointing as it’s a gift.
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 January 2017
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 October 2023
Delivered quickly but one of the pages is ripped, bit disappointing as it’s a gift.
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 February 2013
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Review of My Best Friend and Other Friends.
Reviewed in the United States on 4 February 2013