Anne of Green Bagels

Gr 4–7—Anne feels like an outsider compared to her new sixth-grade classmates, not least because she has recently moved in with her grandparents while her father tests a portable homeless shelter in authentic conditions. Anne plays violin with her new friend Otto, with whom she shares a love of the children's show The Blimptons. As she and Otto prepare to play in a school recital under the name "The Green Bagels," an attempt at reclaiming an insult from Anne's first day of school, she experiences vivid stress dreams about her father, school bullying, and performance anxiety. Silent illustrated sequences depict Anne's dreams, ranging from the symbolically pedestrian to the eerie and evocative. High emotions and key explosions of personality are also inserted into the narrative as brief comic illustrations, with similar varying degrees of success or distraction from the story. Buller and Schade work hard to give the characters psychological depth, a necessity in a book structured around dream sequences, and just about every character is given a chance to prove that they are better than Anne's initial judgements. But the climax of the action falls spectacularly flat, as all the plot threads converge in a hasty jumble, lacking pacing and emotional weight.