Hamlet Kennedy just wants to be your average, happy, vanilla eighth grader. But with Shakespearean scholar parents who dress in Elizabethan regalia and generally go about in public as if it were the sixteenth century, thatÕs not terribly easy. It gets worse when they decide that HamletÕs genius seven year-old sister will attend middle school with herÑ and even worse when the Shakespeare project is announced and her sister is named the new math tutor. By the time an in-class recitation reveals that our heroine is an extraordinary Shakespearean actress, Hamlet can no longer hide from the fact that sheÑlike her familyÑis anything but average.

In a novel every bit as funny as her debut, Erin Dionne has created another eighth grader whose situation is utterly uniqueÑbut whose foibles and farces will resound with every girl currently suffering through middle school.