JIU-JITSU GIRL

New kid Angie is on a mission to achieve popularity.

Twelve-year-old Angie Larson wants to make sure she’s not invisible at her new middle school like she was before. The key to popularity, she deduces, comes in befriending her class’s resident queen bee, Olivia Hart. She thinks she’ll have it made if she can score an invite to Olivia’s birthday party. One of the main obstacles to the image she wants to project, however, comes from her mother’s insistence that she take jujitsu despite Angie’s passionately hating it (and even making a lengthy list of why she finds it gross). Not only that, Angie’s mother signs her up for a tournament, meaning even more time on the mat. The first-person narrative, which expounds at length about Angie’s cool girl ambitions, also gives room to play-by-play exposition on diabetes (a prominent secondary character has it) and the mechanics behind how the martial arts moves work. The book uses cringe humor, putting Angie in embarrassing situations (that her mother is luckily often there to solve for her), but it also has Angie grappling with heavier issues like bullying and body image in subplots that have tidy conclusions that might strike some readers as too simplistic. Angie and Olivia are White; ethnic diversity is mostly signaled through characters’ names.

The main character grows over the course of this story, but her path is loaded with heavy-handed didacticism.