BOOKS:
The Beacon Street Girls Series
Author: Annie Bryant
The Beacon Street girls offer us a multi-sensory, multi-ethnic, and multi-situational mix of wit and wisdom. But I must confess that it was Charlotte's first bite into a crisp New England Macintosh apple tossed to her by a Russian émigré shopkeeper on her way to her first day of 7th grade, and her first day of school in America, that had me hooked before the end of the second chapter. In Europe, I've only been able to find this transporting taste of home and autumn in a fruit shop in Zurich's international airport, a place, alas, infrequently visited by me.
In addition to being the new girl on the block, Charlotte is the only child in a single-parent family. As soon as she gets to school, she will make the acquaintance of Katani, business and fashion guru whose grandmother is the school principal, athletically-gifted Avery, Asian and adopted, who doesn't like descriptive boxes and Maeve, boy crazy, philanthropic, emphatic, and dyslexic.
All of the girls permit us a visit to the land of emerging adolescence, that tender and scary place of swirling hopes and dreaded embarrassments, surprising maturity and silly slips back into childlessness. This series provides a passport for adults into perhaps-forgotten memories, and a familiar, welcoming port of call for those currently exploring this landscape.
The well-paced narrative, full of modern multi-facetted communication techniques like IMs and blogs, shows us in delightful ways that differences can make good bedfellows, and one friend's weaknesses can be helped by other friends' strengths. But this is no Pollyanna saga. The girls' problems are real ones and their characters and problem-solving techniques are, for the most part, believable.
In many ways, these books are especially pertinent for us and our kids. Katani has a sister who is autistic, and Katani often needs to care for her. Maeve's dyslexia, while not the most favorite part of her life, nonetheless is not her defining feature. Charlotte is coming back to her home country after years abroad and is in many ways a stranger in a strange land. Avery is trying to fit into a country and a culture which is and is not hers.
While a bit on the commercial side, www.beaconstreetgirls.com offers many well-constructed freebies of interest. My favorite was the movie-making option which permits visual as well as linguistic creativity with the added possibility of being able to send your magnum opus off to friends and other critics for viewing.
So far there are two books in this sensitive series by Annie Bryant, published by B'tween Productions, Inc., in 2004, Worst Enemies, Best Friends and Bad News, Good News. Letters from the Heart, Out of Bounds, and Standing Together are on the way. It is available from amazon.com and retails for $7.99 in paperback. . ISBN: 0-974587-0-7.