Thanks to her great mop of flaming-red hair and some unfortunate incidents on the first day, Theodosia \u201cBunny\u201d Baxter\u2019s hopes of invisibly blending in at her new middle school may be dashed. But the ensuing notoriety leaves her alternative scheme\u2014being expelled, so she can go to school with her best friend\u2014all the more doable. Or so she thinks. As it turns out, she\u2019s not very good at bad behavior, among the many endearing qualities that will draw readers to her. Bunny fumbles her way toward successfully coping with many things, including bullying, pressure to sign up for an athletic competition, complex feelings about being adopted, and anxiety attacks that manifest in part as serious rashes. Roberts tucks engaging classroom activities into this already thematically robust tale\u2014like the fizzy social dynamics in an experimental initiative-building class called Discoveries, the ins and outs of creating a garden of native plants, and tagging monarch butterflies\u2014as she artfully tracks a profound transformation in her protagonist\u2019s sense of self. The changes may be Bunny\u2019s doing, but she\u2019s helped along by a generously sized cast of almost uniformly supportive adults and peers (plus one great dog). By the book\u2019s buoyant end, even one prickly girl\u2019s repeated insistence that she\u2019s not Bunny\u2019s friend is sounding hollow. Bunny is cued white, and there\u2019s some racial diversity in the supporting cast.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thanks to her great mop of flaming-red hair and some unfortunate incidents on the first day, Theodosia \u201cBunny\u201d Baxter\u2019s hopes of invisibly blending in at her new middle school may be dashed. But the ensuing notoriety leaves her alternative scheme\u2014being expelled, so she can go to school with her best friend\u2014all the more doable. Or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3631,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3630"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}