Join the Club, Maggie Diaz

Gr 4-8–After a boring summer wishing she was at camp like her two best friends, Zoey and Julian, and having to share her bedroom with her abuela, Maggie knows the start of the seventh grade signals big changes for her. When Zoey and Julian start to spend some of their free time in their new clubs with new friends, Maggie is left feeling uncertain, trying to figure out what she might be interested in. Maggie is sure that if she starts to participate in clubs and gets her grades up, she can finally get her own phone and things with her friends can go back to normal. Volunteering to clean beaches and dabbling in woodworking and agriculture are interesting to her, but she is ultimately overwhelmed with all her activities, letting her mom and friends down. Fun and quirky, Maggie Diaz is a character many readers will relate to as she begins to juggle more responsibilities while struggling with insecurity and forgetfulness. The fast-paced, first-person narration reveals these thoughts to readers, who might easily predict the wave that is about to come crashing down on Maggie. The black-and-white and grayscale illustrations add another layer of fun to this accessible middle grade novel, welcoming even more readers to Maggie’s world. The heroine discovers the powerful message that not everything has to be checked off a to-do list, and things don’t always have to be perfect.