Best Friends and Drama Queens (Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls #3)

Cabot, Meg. Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls: Best Friends and Drama Queens. Scholastic, 2009. Tr. $15.99 ISBN 978-0-545-04043-3.

What’s it about?
When Allie comes back to school after winter break, she discovers she is no longer the new girl--there is a new girl Cheyenne, from Canada, who turns fourth grade into a comical boy/girl drama!  

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Not so long ago, Allie Finkle was the new girl at Pine Heights Elementary. Now a girl all the way from Canada is the new kid in town. Allie wants to make her feel welcome, but feels that Mrs. Hunter is asking a bit too much of her when she asks Allie to switch her seat to make room for the new girl. She plans to seat the new girl, Cheyenne, next to Allie’s friend Erica and place Allie in the back with Rosemary (who previously bullied Allie, but then became friends) and the rowdiest boys in the class.  Allie wants to please her favorite teacher, so she says yes. Allie and her friends are nice kids, so when they see Cheyenne all alone at recess, they invite her to play their favorite game. Cheyenne rudely replies that since they are in fourth grade, they are too old to play “babyish” games of pretend. Instead, she introduces the kissing game to the fourth grade. Then she insists that all the fourth graders pair up and start “going together.” Allie isn’t ready for this, but nor is she is ready to be the laughingstock of the fourth grade, with her new nickname “Big Baby Finkle.”

In the third book of the Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls series, Allie is confronted with peer pressure and different type of bullying from what she faced in The New Girl. Her new classmate is pushing herself and her classmates into growing up. Kissing and going out are not usually high on the list of a fourth grader’s priorities, but they are high on Cheyenne’s list. She influences her peers to discard everything she thinks is “babyish,” and pushes them to do things most of them are not ready for, and don’t yet understand. Young tweens are confronted by this constantly, by the media and their peers, and it is refreshing to see that Allie remains a hold out. This isn’t easy for her to do, though. She is ridiculed, especially when she ends up being the only girl besides Rosemary to not “go out” with a boy, and ends up so upset that she shuts herself in a closet and bawls.  Allie is not a mindless conformist, but her feelings are as fragile as any other child’s. Hand this book to younger tween girls, especially those navigating the perilous waters of friendship, cliques, bullying and the pressure to grow up too soon.    

Series information:
#1 Moving Day
#2 The New Girl
#3 Best Friends and Drama Queens
#4 Stage Fright
#5 Glitter Girls & the Great Fake Out
#6 Blast from the Past

Read alikes:
Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series

Paula Danizger’s
Judy Blume’s Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great and the Fudge series

For a slightly older audience: Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J. Friedman as Herself, and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret

For a slightly younger audience: Pennypacker’s Clementine series and Park’s Junie B. Jones series

Reading level: 5th grade

Interest level: Grades 3-5

Genre: Humor, Friendship Fiction, Contemporary Realistic Fiction

Subjects: Friendship, cliques, maturity, popularity, rules

Characters:

Allie Finkle—the nine-year-old protagonist with a penchant for rules

Caroline—Allie’s best friend—the smartest girl in fourth grade

Sophie—Allie’s best friend—pretty and in love with “Prince Peter” a.k.a Peter Jacobs

Erica—Allie’s best friend and next-door neighbor—a spirited gymnast

Jay—Allie’s uncle, who is studying poetry in college

Kevin—Allie’s youngest brother, obsessed with pirates

Mark—Allie’s younger brother, obsessed with dirt bikes, bugs and sports

Mrs. Hunter—Allie’s teacher

Rosemary—Allie’s tough classmate, and foe-turned-friend of Allie  

Cheyenne—a boy-obsessed drama queen, who has little tolerance for girls who act like “babies”