October 3, 2011
A clever premise is taken a step too far to be believable in this first novel about the dog-eat-dog world of middle school. Eighth-grader Olivia, the granddaughter of a dog trainer, thinks she has a solution for the bullies who torment her and her friends: “use dog-training on everyone in school, secretly, of course.” This means taking a more aggressive stance against the alpha girls and rewarding good behavior with treats, like homemade cookies and gum. The plan works better than expected, and some of the most vicious students are soon (literally) eating out of the underdogs’ hands. But Olivia learns that people are far more resentful than canines when they realize they’ve been manipulated. The story, which offers a generous quantity of dog puns, is formulaic, and Olivia’s short-lived success and her eventual bonding with her archenemy, Brynne, are predictable. Nonetheless, Olivia emerges as a sympathetic heroine amid cookie-cutter villains and victims. Her internal conflicts, pertaining to low self-esteem and unresolved feelings toward her absent, mentally ill mother, come across as more genuine than her struggles with peers. Ages 10–up.
October 1, 2011
In a high-concept approach to middle-school hierarchies, a group of unpopular eighth graders uses dog-training techniques to combat bullies. Narrator Olivia and her friends Delia, Mandy, Phoebe and Joey are Hubert C. Frost Middle School's "Marcies"—losers. Reigning mean girl Brynne Shawnson and her cronies constantly target them with pranks and ridicule their acne, ill-fitting clothes, infected eyebrow piercing and other traits both real and invented. While helping her dog-trainer grandmother rehabilitate a grass-phobic Mexican Hairless, Olivia hatches her plan. She and her friends launch a three-stage training operation that involves distractions, rewards and ignoring negative behaviors. As the middle-school social order re-forms itself in both predictable and unpredictable ways, Olivia struggles with abandonment and shame about her mother, who has left home for a mental facility. Although the therapist Olivia sees is so ineffectual as to be off-putting rather than comic, Olivia's warm and charmingly self-deprecating narrative voice relates her feelings with a surprising and touching expressiveness. The comparison between dogs and people often feels apt, though it is occasionally carried too far—it's a bit disconcerting to hear Olivia liken her crush to a chocolate Lab, for example, and the notion that ignoring bullies' negative behavior will make them stop seems sadly optimistic. A familiar but well-executed underdog tale. (Fiction. 10-13)
(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
November 1, 2011
Gr 5-9-Hubert C. Frost Middle School is full of dogs of every type, with alphas in charge and lesser pack members doing their bidding. Or, rather, it is full of middle schoolers, all of whom have definite positions in the school's social hierarchy. Unpopular eighth-grader Olivia and her equally unpopular friends from the Bored Game Club are constantly made the butt of practical jokes by kids in the clique that rules the school. Tiring of the bullying, Olivia decides to apply the dog-training techniques she has learned from her grandmother, a professional dog behaviorist, on her classmates. At first, the training seems to work beautifully. Olivia and her friends turn the tables on the kids who have been taunting them, and they find themselves becoming social leaders of the school. Predictably, however, Olivia finds that things aren't as simple as they seem. She and her friends begin to behave just like the students who mistreated them, and Brynne, the mean popular girl, turns out to be extremely vulnerable and to have a lot in common with Olivia. As the class election approaches, Olivia feels so guilty that she confesses all to Brynne, who is outraged about having been trained like a dog and tells the whole school what has been going on. This is an entertaining, if predictable, read, and the protagonist is a sympathetic character, flaws and all. The details of the dog training are fairly accurate, and it is an amusing plot device. Give this one to tweens looking for a lighter take on mean girls and middle-school life.-Kathleen E. Gruver, Burlington County Library, Westampton, NJ
Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
October 15, 2011
Grades 5-8 Middle-school cliques are a whole lot like dog packs. And Olivia Albert knows a thing or two about dog training. Her beloved grandmother and guardian, Corny, is an expert canine behaviorist. Olivia decides, after suffering yet another orchestrated humiliation at the hands of cold-hearted Brynne and her popular friends, to apply what she knows about basic behavior modification and pack mentality to change the social structure at Hubert C. Frost Middle School. Using the seven basic breed groups to classify her classmates according to personality, she unleashes an all-out training regime on her entire school, rewarding kindness with smiles and candy and turning Brynne into a social outcast. Stewart offers a handy and easily understood metaphor to color the intricacies of middle-school relationships in a way that paints each character as multidimensional and real. The topic of dogs is a common one, but Stewart offers something fresh by suggesting that old enemies can sometimes become new friends.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)
January 1, 2012
Tired of being "Marcies," a.k.a. losers, Olivia and her friends use dog-training techniques on the popular kids to change their bad behavior. Like true alpha-dogs, Olivia and company gain attention and respect from the cool crowd--until events lead Olivia to regret her actions. It's a clever setup and the parallels work well, but the story's outcome is entirely predictable.
(Copyright 2012 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)