Emma, 13, finds satisfaction in helping others with their problems, although, as readers quickly learn, her "help" doesn't always have positive outcomes in, telling her best friend her hair would look better with highlights, but inadvertently bleaching a skunklike white streak into it. For her computer class project, Emma begins a seventh-grade advice blog. Unfortunately, her enthusiasm for the project quickly sours as she becomes the target of name-calling and cyberbullying. To her credit, she refuses to quit her blog and uses it to raise awareness about cyberbullying. Her personal, self-deprecating post is nonaccusatory but serious in tone, and, in her final installment, she reminds her classmates that what they write can't be recalled. The year is one of mental, physical, and social growth for the entire class, but especially for Emma. Readers will likely identify an Emma (and her "helpful" attitude) among their peers, but they'll also see themselves in her classmates. The Berks present a spot-on snapshot of middle-school friendship, awkwardness, and budding romance. Pair with Chris Rylander's The Fourth Stall series.

Seventh-grader Emma Woods decides to start an advice blog at school since she's already adept at meddling.Surprisingly, her teachers are fully supportive, putting the blog on the school website. At first there's little interest from fellow students at Austen Middle School (the references will fly over the heads of the audience). After she intervenes with a Spanish teacher to make his classroom management fairer and tries to move a clock forward to end gym class early, however, Emma begins to earn a reputation as an effective mediator, and interest in her blog—as well as push back—picks up. A series of nasty, bullying comments posted on it gives her the opportunity to launch a clever (and a bit didactic if worthwhile) anti-cyberbullying campaign. Convenience plays a heavy role. Teachers and the school principal don't seem to mind her interventions. In a world that's unrealistically convivial, annoyed classmates manage to eventually forgive her failed, sometimes blundering attempts to fix just about everything. Even the disgruntled bully lurks fully offstage, their identity remaining a complete mystery, with the likeliest potential candidates eliminated and the bullying neatly ending as well. But the text is brief and Emma makes a mostly perky and somewhat attractive protagonist, even if she occupies a vanilla-flavored, default-white world, in this first in a series. It remains to be seen whether subsequent volumes will likewise clap back to Jane Austen.An average tale that's most likely to appeal to female grade schoolers who might yet believe that this is an accurate depiction of middle school. (Fiction. 9-11)