Click, by Kayla Miller

Fifth-grader Olive doesn’t have just one group of friends—she’s friendly with everyone in her class, and hangs with different groups at different times.

But when the school variety show gets announced, everyone groups up into different acts… and no one invites her to join them. So she starts questioning the state of her various friendships, whether anyone really likes her, and her place in the world (of fifth grade) in general.

Click is about Olive figuring all of that out: Where she wants to be in the show, and where she stands with and how she relates to her different groups of friends. And—in terms of the bigger picture—it’s about a kid starting out on that long journey of figuring out who she is and who she wants to be.

Nutshell: It’s an easy-going, solid pick for fans of Raina Telgemeier, Victoria Jamieson, and Best Friends.

A few more notes:

• Olive and her mother clash over how to deal with the problem—her mother wants to start calling parents to ask them to ask their kids to include Olive, and Olive is UNDERSTANDABLY horrified—but Miller does a really nice job of not demonizing her mother for making such a Classic Blunder*. Her mother views it as a practical solution—and it probably would be for Olive’s younger brother—but Olive’s at the age where All The Rules Start Changing. But she doesn’t go over Olive’s head—when Olive says no, her mother respects that, even though she thinks the angst is unnecessary.

• There’s some great sibling stuff here, both between Olive and her younger brother AND between Olive’s mother and her own sister. There’s definitely some tension between the adult sisters—not quite sibling rivalry, but a toned-down adult version of that same sort of dynamic?—because Olive’s aunt is the Cool Aunt Who Understands Kids, and because Olive and her aunt are more similar, personality-wise, than Olive and her mother are. It’s subtle, but it’s there. As always, I really do love seeing adults portrayed as three-dimensional beings—as people who don’t have all the answers—in children’s books, because hoo boy, the idea that adults have all the answers is one of the biggest lies of childhood.

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*I call it a Classic Blunder because, good lord, when she suggested it, my stomach dropped and I said, “NOOOOOOOOOO” out loud, because that just DOES. NOT. FLY. and at that age, generally makes things worse? At least in my personal experience it did, *shudder*.

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