Claudia and the New Girl

Ann M. Martin's Claudia and the New Girl is a friendship story for 9 year olds about an arty girl who's dazzled by someone new.

What happens

Claudia Kishi is bored stiff in English. She's watching a fly crawl round a classmate's hair (and wondering whether flies have family reunions). Then the school secretary walks in with Ashley Wyeth.

Ashley wears long flowery skirts, hiking boots and SIX earrings, none of them matching. She's already read every book on the class list. And she's a seriously good artist, picked for a famous Chicago art school when she was eight.

Claudia is a terrible speller (her words). One clever guess turns "pharaoh" into "farrow". Art is the one thing she knows she's good at. So when Ashley studies her portfolio and tells her she's really talented, Claudia feels like the floor is melting.

There's a sculpture contest coming up, with two hundred and fifty dollars for first prize. Ashley offers to help. She only spends time on people with talent, she says. Babysitting doesn't impress her, and lunch with the club sounds like time wasted.

Claudia tells the story herself, and you can feel her being pulled two ways. She skips lunch with her friends to talk art, and she's SO flattered. She loses track of time at a gallery and turns up late to a club meeting. Then she's cross with the others for looking at her funny. Stacey's quiet question, asking if it was as much fun as their trips to the mall, says a lot.

There's plenty of fun too. Accident-prone Jackie Rodowsky gets his hand stuck down the bath plughole behind a locked door. Claudia's way in is over the doghouse, the toolshed and the porch roof!

Has your reader ever had a new friend who made the old ones feel left out? Or been the one left behind? This will feel very familiar.

It's worth knowing that a couple of descriptions haven't aged well. Claudia says hippie women "looked like gypsies", and Ashley ties a strip of denim round her head "like an Indian headband". Both are old-fashioned ways of talking about Romany people and Native Americans. They're worth a quick chat if your reader notices them. It's a very American book too, with sneakers, grades and dollars.

What to read next

This is the twelfth Baby-Sitters Club book, and Claudia explains how the club runs early on. If your reader would rather meet the girls right at the beginning, Kristy's Great Idea is where Claudia and her friends first get the club going.