![]() ![]() Readers who haven't gotten the point by the last paragraph will find somewhat clunky clarification there. Familiar school-story trappings are made fresh by the setting (housing projects are all but ignored by YA writers, with the exception of Walter Dean Myers), and by an appealing, pell-mell narration peppered with exclamations marks that further hasten the pace. ![]() This time out, Wilkinson (Ludell, 1975, etc.) slips issues of race and economic stereotyping into well-worked territory. Roxanne does win new friends, but keeps trying to nail down which behavior is ``cool'' and which isn't: whether to break her mother's rules about guests in order to keep the interest of an eighth-grade boy whether to cut class for a party as the other girls in her ``group'' do. While her number one homegirl, Maxine, is off to a private school on scholarship, Roxanne and others from their Bronx housing project go to public school in nearby Riverdale. ![]() Roxanne's exhilaration as she faces seventh grade is tempered only by her penchant for worry. ![]()
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