Today, standing out on a oval in the middle of my daughter’s sports day (yes the second in the same week, comes from having daycare + school each two days a week) I watched her interacting with the kids around her – five year olds, for the most part. It was delightful chaos, but there was also politicking going on – pecking order, which kids were friends, which ones slyly kicked others or blatantly cheated at the egg and spoon race…

In particular, I watch my daughter interacting with other girls, trying to pick which ones are real friends who genuinely like her, which ones make her feel bad about themselves, which ones are barely aware of her existence… it’s not like high school, it’s not. But I can see the beginnings of it already. I want to cuddle her pre-emptively about all the ups and downs she has ahead of her. All I can do is hope she finds the mates who stick with her, and make her feel vaguely sane as she navigates her school years.

With these thoughts in mind, it was fairly appropriate that I finished reading Lauren Myracle’s Luv Ya Bunches this afternoon. Lauren writes for various age groups, from primary (elementary for Americans) school through to YA, and her novels generally focus on the dynamics of friendship groups, as well as strongly featuring pop culture references, internet and media trends. Love Ya Bunches features (I think) her youngest protagonists to date, a group of ten-year-olds just about to start fifth grade. Yes, my friends, we are entering the Valley of the Tweens.

As with my daughter’s kinder sports day, Luv Ya Bunches is about the long shadow of teenageness that falls over childhood. A lot of elements we associate with the high school years are important to the story – particularly the mean girls/queen bee dynamic, and the ways in which teenagers communicate. Yasaman and Katie-Rose are both creative, technically-minded girls who individually dream is to be old enough to use internet features such as Facebook and YouTube. Yasaman goes so far as to set up her own website where she and her similarly underage friends can happily IM, upload content, blog and (most important!) send each other virtual cupcakes, but the only problem is, she has no friends. As far as everyone is concerned, she’s the weird Muslim girl in the head scarf who never talks.

Katie-Rose is on a mission. Well, two missions. To become a world-class cinematographer, and to rescue Milla from the trio of Popular Girls. She just knows Milla is a fun, cool person, but Milla doesn’t seem to want to be saved. Then there’s Violet the new girl, who is dealing with her own issues. She is adopted by the Popular Girls, but is that where she wants to be?

Despite all the trappings, and my heart sinking because really, does all that backstabbing negotiation of friendship start that early? (oh yes, it does) there is no doubt that this is a book for the younger set. The plot is very simple, and revolves entirely around the McGuffin of a lost ‘lucky talisman’ (it’s a toy, girls) – who would take it? why? who found it? who is getting framed for having stolen it? The resolution was put into position long before it was needed, which was a touch frustrating as an adult reader. More interesting to me was the theme of bullying in its different forms, though a sub-plot featuring Yasaman’s little sister turned up a little late in the narrative. I would have liked to see more of that story.

But it’s not about me. The book is fun and frothy and rattles along. The characters are lovely and vibrant, if occasionally dissolving in a vat of sugary sweetness (hey, they’re ten, we’re lucky they’re not in fairy costumes, right?). There’s a lovely geekboy with a domino fixation who drifts in and out of the utter girlness of the whole affair. The hardcover edition is beautifully designed and laid out, with two colour pages (orange!), graphics and general cuteness. The story shifts between traditional narrative, IM chats and transcripts of video footage, providing a clever postmodern edge for the pre-teen set.

And then there are the layers. Little things that shouldn’t make a difference to a book, but they do. Much has been made of Milla and her two moms – the whole Scholastic Book Fair debacle involving censorship and exclusion of the books, as well as a request that the offending parents be edited into a more heteronormative family, has been covered most extensively at Lee Wind’s I’m Here I’m Queer What The Hell Do I Read blog, though Lauren has also discussed it on her own, posting letters from various readers. (latest update is that conservative parents are now protesting that Scholastic is allowing the book into their middle school fairs) As it happens, the references are background only – I can see how anyone who doesn’t value having a variety of different families represented in fiction might thing it would be easy to edit out, but that’s so not the point. The awesome thing about Milla and her two moms is precisely that it’s just there – that everyone knows about it, and it’s barely even a talking point.

Also tucked away in the background is a family secret for Violet, whose sadness overwhelmed me in her first few scenes. Her mother, it is revealed piece by piece, has been hospitalised due to manic depression, leaving Violet and her father to cope on their own – mostly by not talking about it. This is more a layer to Violet’s character than anything directly relevant to the plot, except of course that Violet’s grief and stress over the situation informs her actions, which sets the plot moving. I was really pleased to see this issue dealt with in children’s fiction, as sympathetic references to mental illness in fiction are just as rare as, you know, having gay parents, and yet these are things that many kids do deal with every day.

Then there’s the fact that each of the kids has a different cultural background – this is something I’ve talked about before, not just the whiteness of YA/teen/children’s fiction, but the lack of any cultural background or influences in so many protagonists. In the Luv Ya Bunches gang we have a blonde white girl, a black girl, a Muslim girl and a half-Chinese girl, and they have very different levels of cultural baggage.

I read Luv Ya Bunches from the library, but I plan to buy my own copy – not necessarily for my own re-reading, but so that it’s available when my aging-at-a-terrifying-rate daughters are old enough to appreciate it. The book is fresh, contemporary, and is basically laden with messages I approve of (up to and including ‘stand up to bullies but don’t stoop to their level to do it’). Also, did I mention what a pretty book it is? I’m really looking forward to more installments of these very, very modern and with-it ten year olds. They give me hope for my eldest daughter’s future – if she can form a friendship group half as good the ones Lauren crafts in her books, I will have very little to worry about.

(note, I had to go back and edit this entire post because my brain could cope with the Ya but not the Luv and I had written Love throughout. Possibly I am not cut out for this century)

Tags: lauren myracle, reading, tweens