Middle School is Worse Than Meatloaf: A Year Told Through Stuff by Jennifer L. Holm

Ginny has ten items on her big to-do list for seventh grade. She uses notes, grocery receipts, report cards, calendars, art work, bottle caps, newspaper clippings, and other pieces of stuff to explain a year in middle school where things never turned out as expected.

What a way cool book this is! When the title says a year told through stuff, it means it--this book does not use traditional prose to tell the story, it's a collection of stuff. Reading this book is rather like looking through someone's scrapbook or shoebox of things, or possibly rifling through their trash, though everything's been organized in chronological order so the story make sense. It reminds me of Avi's book Nothing But the Truth (1991), which is told through letters, memos, radio transcripts, telephone conversations, and newspaper articles, but Holm adds a graphic element so instead a reading the text of a memo you see the actual memo, or post-it note, or ticket stub, or whatever. It's not surprising that she's done a book in this form--Jennifer Holm is the author of the graphic novel series Babymouse.