ALLIE FINKLE'S RULES FOR GIRLS:
Book One - Moving Day
by Meg Cabot
Scholastic Paperbacks
Hardcover: 9780545039475
Paperback: 9780545040419
Ages 8-12
256 pages

• About the Book
• Read an Excerpt
• Author Interview –– June 2008
• Author Talk –– February 2008

Allie Finkle is nine years old, but she has issues --- serious issues. First of all, she accidentally touched her friend's uvula with a spatula, and now Mary Kay is barely speaking to her. She also must think about the bombshell her parents recently dropped on her --- that they are moving from their lovely suburban split-level to a haunted fixer-upper in another town where she faces the prospect of having to attend a new school and make new friends. Add two bratty little brothers and the possibility of a new pet kitten into the mix, and you have fourth-grade chaos!

Allie, however, is a resourceful and intelligent girl. As she states herself, "I like rules. The reason why is, rules help make our lives easier. That's why I like science and math. You know where you stand with them, rulewise. What I'm not so crazy about is everything else. Because there are no rules for everything else." And so goes Meg Cabot's opening installment in her first series for tweens, Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls. Book one is subtitled MOVING DAY, and it's a joy to read.

Allie manages to override her every disappointment (her relocation to an ancient Victorian house, the unwanted specter she insists is living in their new dilapidated attic, the loss of her beloved and hard-won rock collection at her old home) with a measure of both grace and bravado that will have young readers cracking up. She is a great heroine --- plucky and snarky as well as resourceful and honest --- though she is not above the kind of annoyance that most girls her age would experience, especially sharing a house with two younger brothers. But she isn’t snotty or a gossip, and her interests are not limited to fashion and Bratz-oriented activities. In short, Allie is an honest-to-goodness all-American kid.

Cabot has created Allie so that there are a million and one different things that can happen to her in order to make a complete book series (and perhaps a TV program or the occasional film adaptation, which the author is used to watching her work morph into, ala The Princess Diaries). Like Harriet the Spy or Henry Huggins, Allie is a typical kid with a normal life that is heightened just enough to make good drama, teach some lessons without feeling moralistic, and bring the reader into occasional convulsions of laughter. Not a bad prospect.

Allie's interest in math and science is a great addition to her other "kid" things. Since there is a push in education to make these pursuits more amenable to girls, especially at this age, Cabot does everyone a favor by highlighting them. But Allie is no geek. She’s not some genius blowing things up in a home-basement lab, which is a relief. This is a trend that I hope becomes a popular one for other writers in this genre.

Cabot's winning tone and characterizations will make Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls a surefire hit with its target audience as well as parents who care to provide their children with role models you can't find in other media created for this age group. Long live Allie Finkle!

    --- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

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