New kid Angie is on a mission to achieve popularity.Twelve-year-old Angie Larson wants to make sure she's not invisible at her new middle school like she was before. The key to popularity, she deduces, comes in befriending her class's resident queen bee, Olivia Hart. She thinks she'll have it made if she can score an invite to Olivia's birthday party. One of the main obstacles to the image she wants to project, however, comes from her mother's insistence that she take jujitsu despite Angie's passionately hating it (and even making a lengthy list of why she finds it gross). Not only that, Angie's mother signs her up for a tournament, meaning even more time on the mat. The first-person narrative, which expounds at length about Angie's cool girl ambitions, also gives room to play-by-play exposition on diabetes (a prominent secondary character has it) and the mechanics behind how the martial arts moves work. The book uses cringe humor, putting Angie in embarrassing situations (that her mother is luckily often there to solve for her), but it also has Angie grappling with heavier issues like bullying and body image in subplots that have tidy conclusions that might strike some readers as too simplistic. Angie and Olivia are White; ethnic diversity is mostly signaled through characters' names.The main character grows over the course of this story, but her path is loaded with heavy-handed didacticism. (Fiction. 8-12)

Gr 4–6 —Angie Larsen is not having an easy time. She started sixth grade at a new school where, in an effort to overcome her past invisibility, she is determined to be liked by the popular girls (easier said than done). Even worse is that her mother is forcing her to take jiu-jitsu classes, which she hates! Angie's desire to impress the bullying popular girls has terrible consequences as she starts to question her body image and cruelly rejects a burgeoning friendship with her supportive science project partner. As the jiu-jitsu classes build Angie's physical strength and assurance, they also encourage her to reexamine what kind of person, daughter, and friend she wants to be. It turns out that jiu-jitsu and not being one of the popular kids are actually pretty great after all. There is some mild gross-out humor, mostly involving sweat and boogers as part of the close contact that comes with grappling on the jiu-jitsu mat. Readers learn that Angie's mother pushes the jiu-jitsu classes because she had an experience where she was not able to defend herself. This is concerning, but the idea is quickly dismissed without any illuminating details. The prevailing message is that real friends are people who make you feel good about yourself and support you, not those who make themselves bigger at the expense of others. VERDICT This is a positive journey to true friendship and self-confidence, certain to appeal to martial arts fans.—Alyssa Annico