With great sensitivity and tenderness, Lynne Rae Perkins captures the devastation that is inevitable when young girl loses her best friend to someone else. Debbie is a quiet and creative child on the verge of adolescence who sometimes relates to adults more easily than to her peers. She can't quite grasp what has happened between her and her once-best-friend, Maureen. Once it was Debbie and the outgoing Maureen who shared every spare moment; then Glenna entered the picture. "Glenna was small and neat and boring and ordinary and irritating. That's what I thought. I thought Maureen felt sorry for her.". But Debbie can feel that when the three of them are together, she is the one who doesn't fit, not Glenna. She and Maureen are still friendly-there is no anger or fighting. But Debbie feels a growing sense of abandonment and sadness. The understated first-person narrative told in Debbie's observant and honest voice admirably refrains from placing blame. Despite Debbie's own obvious dislike of Glenna, reade's are given the opportunity to observe how a friendship can change without anyone necessarily being at fault. Like Debbie, they also discover how the sense of loss can eventually fade, to be replaced by the sweet realization that new friends are waiting to be discovered. (Ages 9-12)

"Before last summer Maureen and I were best friends....At least I think we were. I don't know what happened exactly. As some people who get hit by trucks sometimes say,'I didn't see anything coming.'"

When her best friend since the third grade starts acting as though Debbie doesn't exist, Debbie finds out the hard way that life can be a lonesome place. But in the end the heroine of this wryly funny coming-of-age story--a girl who lives in a house covered with stuff that is supposed to look like bricks but is just a fake brick pattern--discovers that even the hourly tragedies of junior high school can have silver linings, just as a house covered with Insul-Brick can protect a real home. This first novel shines--fun, engrossing, bittersweet, and wonderfully unpredictable.