Remember those good old days of summer before you got roped into horrific high school summer projects/jobs/chores? It was just you, your best friend, a couple of bikes and two months of do-nothing stretching out to the horizon.That’s how it always was for Bina. She couldn’t wait until June so she and her best friend Austin could hang at the pool and add points to their Summer Fun Index (scientifically based on number of video games played, movies watched and stray cats petted, of course). But the summer after seventh grade, Austin has traded the Summer Fun Index for soccer camp, and Bina is convinced that her summer is gonna suck–hard. When her parents lock her out of their Netflix account because she’s “watched a summer’s worth of TV in a week,” Bina is forced to hunt down entertainment elsewhere. Oddly enough, without Austin around, Bina discovers that there’s a whole other world out there of cool older girls, indie music and her own untapped inner talents. This utterly endearing, oh-so-true graphic novel about one rising eighth grader’s summer adventures in babysitting, mean-girl-taming and indie-band-watching will make you feel so nostalgic for middle school that I bet you go dig up your Muji Pen Set
and find an old notebook to doodle in. A terrifically un-taxing summer read that you’ll finish in an afternoon and think about the rest of the week!
