Girls, girls, girls. No matter where he turns, Jeremy Miner is surrounded by them. At home, it’s mom and his two sisters. And then all day at school it’s . . . well, everyone. St. Edith’s Academy, a fo
rmer all-girls school, made an effort to go co-ed, but there’s been a lot of attrition among their boy population and before Jeremy knows it, he’s the last one. The absolute last male student at St. Edith’s Academy. Yikes. Jeremy’s determined to do something about this situation, and he finds his solution in an unlikely place: a series of escalating pranks that he commits along with one of his best female (well, duh) friends at St. Edith’s, the spunky filmmaker Claudia. But as he seemingly gets closer to earning an expulsion from his school, Jeremy starts to second-guess his plan. Is the problem really St. Edith’s? Or could this place be where he really belongs?
As the survivor of an all-girls education (okay, just high school, but still, that was intense!), I totally related to Jeremy. Being immersed in a sea of girls is not always easy. Sometimes, you just miss having close friends of both genders!
Debut author Lee Gjertsen Malone’s novel is just plain fun. Jeremy is such a winsome protagonist, and I totally fell for his group of girl friends at St. Edith’s. Jeremy’s cluelessness about his friend/neighbor Emily’s crush on him was entirely realistic, and will especially ring true to middle school readers. (It was also heartbreakingly real for all us girls out there that totally found ourselves in Emily’s shoes at that age. ::Raises hand.::) There’s so much that Malone gets right about this fraught age, where the last thing you want is to be the one kid who stands out.
The Last Boy at St. Edith’s (Aladdin/ Simon & Schuster) will be in a bookstore/library near you starting February 23, 2016.
