The Weird Friends Fan Club

Catherine Wilkins's The Weird Friends Fan Club is a funny friendship story for 11 year olds told through two diaries that couldn't be more different.

What happens

Erin and Grace both sit in the same top English set in Year Nine. That's where the likeness stops. Erin lives in a tiny flat with her mum and her sister, with a bathroom smaller than her best friend's bath. Grace posts hairdresser selfies with six hashtags and signs off #lovetomyenemies.

Their English teacher, Mrs Wilson, has asked each of them to keep a diary. We get to read both, side by side.

That's the fun of it. Grace is sure she's the best writer in the school (she's already imagining the museum they'll build about her). Erin thinks Grace is the meanest of the "basic Barbies". Then Erin moves up a set, takes the empty seat at Grace's table, and it all kicks off.

What they do share is Charlotte Brontë. They both adore her. So Mrs Wilson starts a writing club for just the two of them. There's a competition in the air too, with a trip to the Brontë Parsonage as the prize, and they both want it badly.

Their stories are brilliant. For the first task they each rewrite Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Erin's is about the bears' marriage falling apart. Grace's has a twist that makes you see her very differently.

It's very funny, but it's honest as well. Erin's family is short of money and her dad barely listens. Grace's mum died when she was a baby, and her dad's idea of encouragement is "second place is first loser". Reading both diaries, you see what each girl can't see about the other.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

There's some proper meanness at the start. A boy keeps shouting "Monobrow!" across the classroom, Grace's group make fun of Erin's face, and Erin ends up plucking her eyebrows to make it stop. There's the odd "God" and "what the hell" too. The girls are fourteen, so it reads at the older end of the shelf.

For a reader who's starting to navigate friendship groups and who's in or out, it could be really reassuring. Who hasn't judged someone before they knew them?

What to read next

If your reader enjoys a school story about writing and working out who your friends are, Dear Student is a lovely next step. Autumn starts middle school without her best friend and wonders about secretly becoming the voice of the school's advice column.