Bully
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Patricia Polacco takes on cliques and online bullying
Lyla finds a great friend in Jamie on her first day of school, but when Lyla makes the cheerleading squad and a clique of popular girls invites her to join them, Jamie is left behind. Lyla knows bullying when she sees it, though, and when she sees the girls viciously teasing classmates on Facebook, including Jamie, she is smart enough to get out. But no one dumps these girls, and now they're out for revenge.
Patricia Polacco has taken up the cause against bullies ever since Thank You, Mr. Falker, and her passion shines through in this powerful story of a girl who stands up for a friend.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Polacco's middle-school variation on Mean Girls is an overwrought but compelling literary hybrid: it reads like a novella with pictures. Sixth-grader Lyla and her brother, Jack, are new kids at a Bay Area school with a cutthroat social scene. Lyla is accepted into the popular girls' clique, but grapples with the fact that the very same kids are bullying Jack and a boy named Jamie on Facebook, as well as in the hallways and lunchroom. That would be plenty to digest, but Polacco raises the stakes to a lurid level with a stolen achievement test and a tragic back story for the clique's leader, turning potentially empathetic readers into rubberneckers. While the story's emphasis on cyber-bullying is important and timely, Polacco's message is delivered with a heavy hand. Visually, though, it's striking. As always, Polacco (The Art of Miss Chew) is an exuberantly expansive stylist, and a master of emotional immediacy: her pencil and marker spreads explode with color and expressiveness. Few artists are better equipped to capture the hothouse that is early adolescent school life, complete with its all-important fashion parade. Ages 7 up.
