Beware of Kissing Lizard Lips

Phyllis Shalant's book for children and young adults include The Great Eye, When Pirates Came to Brooklyn, Bartleby of the Big Bad Bayou, and The Society of Super Secret Heroes: The Great Cape Rescue. The author lives in White Plains, New York with her husband and a large dog named Ozzie. Visit her website at www.phyllisshalant.com.

Gr. 4^-6. Zach wishes he wasn't the shortest, scrawniest boy in the sixth grade. Despite all his chin-ups and workouts, his muscles look like zits. A girl in his class agrees to teach him tae kwon do: does that mean she likes him or that she wants to fight? Then he's invited to his first boy-girl party, and he's ecstatic. Elated. Terrified. What do you do at a boy-girl party? He's been thinking about girls all the time lately. He wishes his best friend, Dunk, would be interested, too, instead of wanting to gross out girls, chasing them around the cafeteria with spaghetti hanging out of his nose. Or is Dunk really as uninterested as he says? This is a laugh-out-loud story about growing up male, written without a trace of condescension. The dialogue captures how boys tease and play on the edge of hostility; how loyalty and jealousy can get in each other's way, even with best friends; what it feels like to be on the verge of adolescence, dreaming of girls, discovering the wonder that "females were made so . . . intelligently!" There's one set teacher's speech about artistic types being heroes, not wimps, but the messages are light, and they grow from the story. Kids will recognize that macho posturing can hide vulnerability and that even though the worst does happen, you get over it. Hazel Rochman