Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone

Juvenile fiction

     Jennifer Chan is the new kid in town.  She's not your run-of-the-mill twelve-year old.  She believes in aliens.  She sees them not as horror movie bizarre looking creatures, but as superior beings, maybe humanity's only chance for learning better ways of being.  She actively seeks to make contact with them, filling notebooks with her observations.

     Mallory, narrator of Tae Keller's Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone, finds her new neighbor to be cringe worthy: totally unable to survive middle school unless she learns how to stop being weird and fit in, someone who might endanger her own social standing.  When summer ends she sets Jennifer up with two girls, Kath and Ingrid, who are low on her school's social hierarchy and goes on with her life...

     ...until Jennifer is missing and the object of a town wide search.  Suddenly her theories don't seem so bizarre, especially since Mallory saw what looked like a UFO the night of her disappearance.  She, Kath, and Ingrid start trying to use radio frequencies to try to contact extraterrestrial beings to get them to return her. 

     Only the reason for Jennifer vanishing may be much more down to Earth.  Perhaps it has a lot to do with an incident of bullying conducted in a school bathroom to put her in her place, an incident Mallory was involved in.

     In middle school Keller was bullied both online and in person, the victim of an incident very much like the one described in her book.  Years later, as an author of books about middle school, she decided that her readers deserved to learn about this episode in her personal history.  She ends the book with advice for kids today enduring similar experiences.

On a purrrsonal note, I was really disappointed when I didn't get an Upward Bound job this summer.  But I still wanted to be involved with the program.  So I offered to volunteer.  I will be working in the clothes room and planning some evening programs.  I'm really excited about that!  (Jules)

As long as she has time for me.  (Tobago)

a great big shout out goes out to this year's Upward Bound crew.

Tobago and Jules Hathaway