Mom•Logic friend and author Tracy McArdle reviews Freak for us and says it's a great read for Moms and teens together.

Freak
By Marcella Pixley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16 

If you, like many of us, were slightly less than cool in junior high, rest assured. We know your secret. Turns out that more than a few of us suffered miserably at the hands of the 8th grade bombshells with the right jeans and perfect hair. Personally, I had the honor of looking like neither girl or boy until I was about 14, and was neighed at by the boy I secretly loved. Suffice it to say that my best friends were my rabbit, my pony, and my green velour V-neck sweater from Sears.

Eighth grade language arts teacher Marcella Pixley’s emotionally rich debut novel Freak stirs up painful memories for those who have long since forgotten what a social minefield junior high can be. While Freak is technically a young adult novel, its powerfully elegant prose and fully evolved characters make compelling reading for those 13 or 39. This is one to read with your daughter, provided she’s been tying her own shoes for several years now.

Freak’s scrappy heroine, Miriam Fisher, reads the dictionary for fun and is nicknamed Shakespeare by her one and only friend. With her unconventional looks and odd habit of carting around a journal named Clyde, she is an outsider among outsiders, subjected to the daily torment by the popular “Watermelon Girls.” Worse, her older sister, once her closest friend, has suddenly blossomed into high school popularity with all the trappings—pretty, clean hair, makeup, the right clothes, and dates—and new friends that want nothing to do with Miriam except to torture her for fun. And the boy she feels is her soulmate, heartthrob high school senior Artie Rosenberg, comes to live with her family for the school year, and is obliged to treat Miriam like the cute kid sister she so desperately does not want to be.

Miriam’s journey is not so different from that of Pixley’s. In an interview with the Boston Globe she relays her past struggles with nonconformity and horrendous victimization at the hands of popular girls in her own junior high many years ago. It’s also clear that her intimate exposure to this age group through teaching has lent her writing a casual polish that feels not only authentic, but invitingly raw, like viewing a secret world from behind the stall door in the girl’s school bathroom.

Pixley, who is also an accomplished poet, weaves an addicting narrative with lively, three dimensional characters using several threads: family, courage, self-identity, strength and the painful truths of adolescent honesty. Miriam is a fighter, intense and determined, one you root for despite her oddities. Her story builds to an astonishing climax that, by the time you get there, will have you heaving a huge sigh of relief because you almost couldn’t stand Miriam’s heartbreaking journey one more grueling minute. If there is a flaw with Freak, it is this blistering pace and almost unbelievable level of cruelty—to Miriam and yes, to the reader. Hang in there—you’ll be glad you did.

Freak could have easily detoured into the clichéd and overwritten hyperbole of the typical teen girls bully story, but Pixley keeps it fresh, inviting, and even inspiring. You have never met anyone, I promise, like Miriam Fisher.

Hollywood, take note: This is the real Mean Girls.

Tracy McArdle works in marketing and is the author of Real Women Eat Beef and Confessions of a Nervous Shiksa, available from Downtown Press. She graduated from Fordham University and the Sorbonne in Paris, and spent twelve years working in the entertainment industry in New York and Los Angeles before moving home to New England in 2003. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe and Premiere magazine. She lives with her husband, two horses, a dog, and her cat, Little, in Carlisle, Massachusetts, the home of Fern's Country Store.