BEST FRIENDS

Gemma and Alice have been best friends from the day they were born. For real: Their mothers gave birth to them on the same day and they’ve been BFFs ever since—until the day that Alice’s family moves to Scotland. Total opposites, Alice is feminine and well-behaved while Gemma has a propensity for causing calamities, which stages the action. A taxi-driving dad, two older brothers, a dog named Barking Mad, her mom who wants a curly-girly (like Alice), a fun-loving granddad and a fat classmate who loves to eat (named Biscuits) round out the cast. While stories about best friends separated by moving are plentiful, Wilson’s British fillip makes this one original, with Gemma’s strong first-person voice and personality and Sharratt’s black-and-white drawings in strip-style sketches before each chapter teasing the reader and forecasting the next turn of events. Gemma’s dilemmas—crying jags, chocolate binges, cake-throwing, special dolls and bracelets and birthday wishes—are sprinkled with British idioms; this will cause no problems for American readers, who will be grinning all the while. (Fiction. 9-12)