The First Rule of Punk

Celia C. Pérez's The First Rule of Punk is a story for 9 year olds about starting again a long way from home, with the wrong hair and the wrong shoes.

What happens

Malú is nearly thirteen and she's packing. Her mum has a two-year job contract in Chicago and Malú is going with her. Her dad and his record shop are staying where they are.

The shop is called Spins & Needles and it's the best place Malú knows. She alphabetises the bins. She decorates the dividers. She has stood in the crowd at gigs there wanting to sing along into the microphone and never once done it.

She makes zines, which are little homemade magazines you cut and glue and photocopy. She learned it from her dad's old collection. Lately most of them have been about the move.

On the last night they get takeaway, dance round the shop, and watch The Wizard of Oz, which is their thing. Dad gives her a Walkman, a mix tape and six tiny worry dolls you put under your pillow.

Then it's Chicago, and a new school with a dress code. On her first day Malú gets sent to the auditorium with the other offenders and made to fill in a form. Under the reason she writes "disruptive physical alteration". Then a teacher sends her to the nurse to scrub her makeup off.

Lunch is a tray of coloured blobs and a book to hide behind while she works out where her people might be.

What makes it good is how specific it all is. The scarf her mum knits when she's stressed. The photo booth strip. The feeling of being got at by your mother over a T-shirt when the actual argument is about something much bigger.

It's American through and through, so it's Mom and Dad and middle school and seventh grade. Her parents split up when she was a baby and are perfectly friendly, which Malú finds almost annoying.

If you've got a reader who has been the new one, or who feels half of one thing and half of another and not quite enough of either, this will land hard in a good way.

What to read next

Malú has a picture of Frida Kahlo up on her bedroom wall. If that's the side of her your reader takes to, try Me, Frida, and the Secret of the Peacock Ring, about a girl packed off to Mexico City for a month she absolutely did not ask for, armed with one small vocabulary book and barely any Spanish.