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Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's The Agony of Alice is a funny, cringey school story for 10 year olds about a girl looking for someone to show her how to grow up.
Alice McKinley is moving house just before sixth grade, and she's decided what she needs is someone to copy. Her mum died when she was five. At home it's just Dad and her brother Lester, who's nineteen and no help at all.
The trouble is that Alice keeps embarrassing herself. A lot. She tells the kind new neighbours her family is eating out, just as they turn up with a hot dinner. She opens the wrong changing-room door on a boy in his underpants (and of course he turns out to be the safety patrol boy at the school crossing).
So when she spots the gorgeous Miss Cole in the playground, Alice picks her as an adopted mother. Miss Cole won't even know. There's just one snag. Alice gets put in Mrs Plotkin's class instead.
Alice is fairly awful to poor Mrs Plotkin on day one. She copies her in front of everyone and pretends to snore through story time. Mrs Plotkin's response is to quietly offer her a place as a substitute safety patrol. It's one of the loveliest moments in the opening chapters.
Alice tells the whole thing herself, and she's painfully honest. She even draws up a list of her life in two columns, Forward and Backward, and Backward is winning. You'll probably recognise some of it. Who hasn't replayed something mortifying at bedtime years after it happened?
It's very funny about that in-between age. Alice worries about being babyish and about whether she'll ever get it right. There's a little bit of growing-up talk (mostly a girl with no idea how to buy a bra) and her mum's death is backstory rather than part of the plot. Some of the details are American and a bit old-fashioned, which is half the charm.
If your reader enjoyed this one, The Extremely Embarrassing Life of Lottie Brooks is another girl keeping a very honest record of her worst moments, just as she's about to start a new school without her best friend.
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