Grace Notes

Grace Notes
Dandi Daley Mackall
ZonderKidz
ISBN: 0-310-71093-6
Fiction,Young Adult, Blog
Reviewed by John Clark

Gracie Peters is an observer, a role she has adopted because it fits her and makes her feel safe. She doesn't really have a niche at school and often wonders if her peers even know she exists. What Gracie is good at is turning her observations into highly descriptive narratives. Ordinarily, such narratives would go in a diary, but this is the information age and Gracie, with the help of her younger step-sister Mick, has turned them into a blog.
'Typical High School', as her blog is called, has taken on a life of its own, with steady readership who post comments and even ask questions. All Gracie's earnings from her after school job as a bagger at the local grocery store go to support her secret passion. When she receives an anonymous email from someone calling themselves the Blog Buster, Gracie panics, frantically trying to figure out who at school is the person threatening to expose her and the one thing in her life that she feels she has control over.
Dandi Mackall has woven an extremely enjoyable story that blends a number of threads relevant to young teens, both male and female in today's troubled times; faith, friendship, honesty, blended families, communication problems and the struggle to fit in. Her ability to get inside Gracie's head and let the reader follow her thinking is very well done. As you follow Gracie's frantic attempt to figure out and unmask the Blog Buster, you can't help but remember your own teen years when it was so easy to fly off the handle and oh, so hard to admit the error of your ways.
The strengths of this book are its ability to show the relationships between the characters, the smooth blending of spiritual questioning and belief in God and the strong story line. I enjoyed this book very much and look forward to the next installment. Given that this deals with an area that is of interest to many teens-blogging, I expect that this book will generate a lot of interest in our library.