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Koss's suspenseful and realistic portrayal of a popular middle school clique's devolution unfolds though six narrators. In a starred review, PW said, "Readers will identify with and remember these characters, and may think twice before sacrificing their individuality for the sake of popularity." Ages 10-14.
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When the other members of Maya's clique decide to ostracize her, the girl is shocked and devastated. She has no clue what she could have done wrong, and neither do Brianna, Ren?e, or Darcy. However, Candace is their leader, the self-assured one, the one who decides who's in and who's not, and, suddenly, Maya's not. In brief chapters that jump from one girl's perspective to another, a picture emerges of social status and peer pressure among middle schoolers who are struggling to figure out who they are, where they belong, and maybe even what is right. The voice of each character is clear and will be familiar to any adolescent. Koss's exceptional skill at evoking not only the girls, but also their families, makes this an important story for those in the midst of the cruelty of middle-school society. This provocative page-turner will be passed from one girl to the next like a note with the latest gossip. - grades 5-8
This multiple-viewpoint novel explores several days in the life of a middle school clique that suddenly shuns one of its members. With poignant, painful detail the author takes us into the mind of each girl involved, brilliantly illuminating the problem of girl-on-girl meanness. Must listening for middle school girls—and the parents who love them!
As a kid, Amy Goldman Koss always wrote and drew, but it wasn't until a perceptive editor "told me I could" that she truly realized that "regular people" could actually become authors. With now four novels to her considerable credit, she says of her newfound career that she has "never enjoyed anything more in my life."
Amy wrote each chapter of "The Girls" in the voice of one girl, a format she says was born out her characters "insistence" that "nobody but them could tell their side of the story." She didn't do any special research but feels that she has on some level experienced every thought and action within the book's funny, squirmy, all-too-real pages. When asked "why middle-grade?", she offers her conviction that "in my heart, that's where my state of arrested adolescence set in."
Amy Goldman Koss says, "The Ashwater Experiment was inspired by a feeling I had for a time as a child that the things in my life were un-real. I can remember walking through a park and seeing trees and thinking they weren't really there, and also seeing newspaper headlines and believing they were just made up to test my reaction! I can't recall exactly what prompted this or how and why I stopped believing it...but I've since found other people who went through the same experience when they were young. There isn't a great deal of me in the character of Hillary-I only wish I were a math genius!-but her thoughts and feelings regarding the Watchers come right out of my childhood."
Amy Goldman Koss's first novel for Dial was The Trouble with Zinny Weston. It received rave reviews from Booklist, which praised it as "a warm, funny friendship story," and Kirkus, which called it "a fast-paced entertaining first novel that is a cut above most friendship fare."
She is also the author of a laugh-out-loud-funny novel called How I Saved Hanukkah (Dial). Ms. Koss both wrote and illustrated Curious Creatures in Peculiar Places, a selection of the 1989 John Burroughs List of Outstanding Nature Books for Children, and Where Fish Go in Winter, a Book-of-the-Month Club Selection. She lives in Glendale, California, with her husband, two children, and many pets.
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