Finally by Wendy Mass

Rory has a list of things she longs to do when she turns 12: stay home alone, shave her legs, babysit, wear makeup, drink coffee . . . So overprotected that she has never ridden in the front seat of a car, Rory can’t wait for her birthday. But those long-anticipated experiences bring some disconcerting surprises.

The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet by Erin Dionne

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, that’s not terribly easy. It gets worse when they decide that Hamlet’s genius sevenyear- old sister will attend middle school with her— 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 she—like her family—is anything but average.