JIn this clever tale, super-shy seventh grader Emmie rarely speaks to a soul at school but loves to draw.
(Copyright 2017 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. Libenson's clever tale will entertain readers in the throes of middle school as well as younger students both wary of and intrigued by their near future. The more visible (and satisfyingly confident and outspoken) Emmie becomes, the less visible Katie becomes, until she completely disappears-a no-longer-needed coping mechanism that existed only in Emmie's imagination and drawings. Both text and illustrations contain appropriately kidlike descriptions of her social anxiety (a squeezy feeling in my stomach ) along with humorous examples of the various horrors of middle school (an illustration shows a spotlight shining on Emmie as she changes clothes for gym class). When a classmate finds a note Emmie wrote about the boy she likes and shares it with everyone, Emmie goes from feeling completely invisible to feeling embarrassingly visible, with all her classmates staring and laughing at her. Emmie loves to draw and fills her narration with amusingly labeled doodles, while Katie's story is told comic-style. JThe main narrative follows a day in the life of super-shy seventh grader Emmie, who rarely speaks to a soul at school occasional sections follow Katie, super-popular and impossibly perfect (she gets straight As, her parents have never embarrassed her, and everyone wants to be her BFF). A well-executed twist will have readers flipping back to see what they missed while cheering the strides made by Libenson’s no-longer-invisible heroine. Katie rises to her defense, but Emmie eventually learns to speak up for herself, realizing that embarrassment isn’t the end of the world and being social isn’t as impossible as she thought. Emmie and Katie share a crush on classmate Tyler, and when a sappy love note Emmie writes to Tyler as a joke is made public, Emmie is humiliated.
INVISIBLE EMMIE COVER MOVIE
Katie’s chapters, by contrast, are big, splashy panels that reflect her outgoing personality (“I’m just your average teenage girl,” she says after being offered movie roles and the crown of homecoming queen). With frizzy hair and hunched shoulders, Emmie shows up in tiny vignettes, sandwiched between blocks of text, that make her look as small and insignificant as she feels. School is stressful for shy, quiet Emmie Katie, meanwhile, is breezily popular, confident, and beautiful. MaIn her first children’s book, cartoonist Libenson ( The Pajama Diaries) offers strikingly different visions of seventh grade through two very dissimilar narrators.
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