The Kind of Friends We Used to Be [Paperback]

Frances O'Roark Dowell (Author)

Book Description

Edgar Award–winning novelist Frances O’Roark Dowell explores the shifting terrain of middle-school friendship in this follow-up to the beloved The Secret Language of Girls. Kate and Marylin are smack dab in the middle of middle school—seventh grade—and they know they can never be best friends like they used to be. Marylin is a middle school cheerleader obsessed with popularity and hairstyles, and Kate is the exact opposite with her combat boots and hankering to learn guitar and write her own songs. Still, Kate and Marylin yearn to find some middle ground for their friendship—but it’s harder than they ever imagined.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This sequel to Dowell's The Secret Language of Girls follows Marylin and Kate as they start seventh grade on a tense note, having drifted from being BFFs to being neighbors who tiptoe around each other, unsure of what to say. The third-person perspective shifts between the two: Marylin learns that being a cheerleader means putting up with obnoxious snobs, and Kate develops an interest in songwriting. This even-handedness is both a strength and a weakness. Both girls are sympathetic but the constant switching back and forth between their various crises—Marylin's parents' divorce; Kate's anxiety over a cute boy in her creative writing club—means neither girl's story gets substantial treatment. It's more a slice of middle school life, kept afloat by Dowell's smart insights into the way the middle school mind works. The territory is familiar, but for girls on either end of a friendship whose contours keep changing, Dowell's treatment will act as a balm. Ages 8–12. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

Grade 5–8—This insightful sequel to The Secret Language of Girls (S & S, 2004) stands alone, but readers will want to go back and find out more about these engaging characters. Kate and Marylin used to be best friends, but sixth grade changed things. Now, as seventh graders, they are trying to work their way back to the way things "used to be." But it's not so easy when they are so different; Kate's new passion is the guitar—and her heavy black boots—while Marylin, a cheerleader, is determined to be feminine and popular at all costs. Alternating points of view make it easy for readers to relate to both girls as they navigate friendship, romance, and family relationships. Dowell gets middle-school dynamics exactly right, and while her empathetic portraits of Kate and Marylin are genuine and heartfelt, even secondary characters are memorable. A realistic and humorous look at the trials and tribulations of growing up and growing independent.—Laurie Slagenwhite, Baldwin Public Library, Birmingham, MI
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers; Reprint edition (April 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416997792
• ISBN-13: 978-1416997795
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #180,487 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Frances O'Roark Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Dovey Coe, which won the Edgar Award, Where I'd Like to Be, the bestselling The Secret Language of Girls, and its sequel The Kind of Friends We Used to Be, Chicken Boy, Shooting the Moon, which was awarded the Christopher Medal, and most recently Falling In. She lives with her husband and two sons in Durham, North Carolina.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "When Kate decided to play the guitar, she realized she would need new shoes.", May 5, 2009

By 

E. R. Bird "Ramseelbird" (Manhattan, NY) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (Hardcover)

Small deviants aside, little kids are friendly folk. Catch `em young enough and you can turn them into friends if they both like making chocolate chip cookies and having sleepovers. They are discerning, but friendship often trumps their differences . . . for a time. Then puberty appears on the horizon and all bets are off. Suddenly kids have to form strategic alliances with their peers. And that friend you made in the second grade? Suddenly you're beginning to realize that you two have very little in common aside from some common history. A fair amount of middle grade fiction gets devoted to this subject every year. Boys and girls go through it, often with a whole messload of hurt feelings along the way. But though it's a sequel to "The Secret Language of Girls", Frances O'Roark Dowell's "The Kind of Friends We Used to Be" stands on its own as an original understanding of what it means for a gal to navigate puberty without losing herself in the process. Startlingly fresh.

This time it began with shoes. Kate's shoes. Kate recently decided that she wants to become a girl guitar player who can wear really awesome shoes that say, "Don't mess with me". In the meantime her former best friend Marylin is trying to get in good with the cheerleader community of their school. Marylin and Kate used to be best friends, but after a nasty incident that happened to Kate the year before they've drifted apart. Now the two want to make up and be best buddies again, but it doesn't always work out that way. Kate's finding interests in some things, Marylin's finding interests in others, and ultimately the question is going to come down to whether or not they want to be themselves or the kinds of people other folks want them to be.

Okay. So in the first paragraph I said that this book stands on its own. And it does, insofar as the author catches you up on some of the details. There was one moment, however, where my confusion could probably be directly attributed to not having read the previous novel. Chapter Two begins (called here "the stars fall over") and I'm merrily reading to myself. I read and read and read, and it occurs to me that the book has taken an odd turn. Why does our main character Kate suddenly care what the cheerleaders think? Have I gotten confused about her personality? I flip back, reread, and veeeery slowly I come to the realization that the point of view has switched. This isn't a book that comes entirely from Kate's perspective. Suddenly at the start of the second chapter we're in Marylin's head. That took some adjusting. As a new reader I'm not going to instantly remember any character's name for at least a chapter or two. Felt like I needed a warning sign or something. A kid in a similar position would probably do what I did too.

Not that the dual p.o.v. isn't a big charm in this book. Often we'll read a losing-your-friend narrative and it comes entirely from the point of view of the loser, rather than the lose-ee. By switching between the two girls you get a more complex understanding of the situation. Plus I love the lack of a whine factor in this book. There is very little whining. Kate is losing Marylin as a friend and that hurts, but she doesn't spend this whole novel bending over backwards trying desperately to do whatever she can to win her friend back. It's funny but neither girl really wants to give up their friendship. But they're like an old married couple that's grown apart, had a big split, and want to find a way to make the relationship work again. Only they haven't a clue how. Where's the Emily Post book on making your old best friend your new best friend again? These gals would need it.

I don't want to call them one-liners, but Dowell also has a way of writing a sentence that punches you in the gut with the familiarity of a given situation. For example, there's the moment when Kate's at Marylin's sleepover, but she's not blending in with the other girls. "She was feeling left out by people she didn't even like. It was insulting." Been there. Had that experience. I bet a lot of other girls have too. I love the moment when Kate inwardly approves of Marylin not saying a word about her clunky boots. "In sixth grade she would have told Kate straight out how horrible she thought her boots were. Now she was trying to manipulate her. It was a big improvement, in Kate's opinion." Dowell loves a good descriptive sentence too. "She was skinny and pale, with the kind of milky white skin you could see the veins underneath, like the little blue highway lines on a map." Heck, Dowell's even good at identifying school types that all of us know/knew. Like the soccer player "with one of those outgoing personalities that made it impossible to know if she liked you or not, because she acted like everyone in the world was her best friend, and how could that be?"

There's a moment when Marylin realizes that she doesn't know where she fits anymore. The cheerleaders aren't quite right. "She wished she could fit in with Kate, and sometimes she still did, but Kate was changing shape, it seemed to Marylin, and it was hard to know exactly how to fit in with her anymore." And that, in a nutshell, is the fate of many a childhood friendship that has hit the tween and teen years. There aren't good guys or bad guys in these situations. Just kids who are growing up and figuring out that their personalities and interests are diverging. Nobody has quite tapped into that reality as well as Frances O'Roark Dowell either. This book looks like every other fluffy tween girly friendship book out there, but inside kids will find a thoughtful, reflective, and ultimately mature (not to mention funny) take on a difficult time. Looks like fluff. Has a brain.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderfully Engaging Tale of the Pleasures and Pains of Tween Friendships, June 3, 2009

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A Customer (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (Hardcover)

We met Kate and Marylin in the previous (excellent) THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF GIRLS. As their story, told in first-person alternating chapters, resumes, they are preparing to enter seventh grade. The girls were once best friends. But now their lives run on parallel tracks, propelled by totally different interests, although they intersect on occasion.

Kate has decided she is destined to become a guitar player, which means she definitely needs new shoes. She has seen female guitar players on TV, and they sure aren't shod in gym shoes, high-tops and the other kinds of footwear Kate has always worn. She needs shoes that send a message, such as the heavy black lace-up boots she finally persuades her mother to buy her.

Kate also finds herself leaving Marylin's cheerleader-heavy sleepover party (which she did not enjoy) early one morning, only to be invited by her ex-enemy Flannery to breakfast. One thing leads to another, and Flannery lends Kate her electric guitar, along with a book on how to play it.

Marylin thinks the whole guitar idea is pretty ridiculous. She's more interested in telling Kate how she and her fellow cheerleaders have decided to wear identical outfits to the first day of school. Marylin wants to give Kate advice so Kate will become what Marylin considers to be a successful, popular seventh grader. Meanwhile, Kate is secretly pleased that Marylin doesn't like her guitar-playing ways. And Kate wants to give Marylin advice:

"Drop cheerleading. Make friends with people who have good values. Ignore fashion. Play guitar."

On the first day of school, Kate and Marylin give a nod to tradition by riding the school bus together. They are tentatively trying out their friendship again after a rough period last year in which Flannery persuaded Marylin to shun Kate. On this day, Marylin is stunned at the sight of Kate's boots. She is appalled, knowing that no one else in seventh grade would wear such a thing.

At school, the girls separate. Marylin joins her fellow cheerleaders, including the leader of the group, a mean-spirited girl named Mazie, where she is tried --- and fails --- in the social mores of the cheerleader group, but not for the last time. There are opportunities to be close to some of the nice girls on the cheerleading team, like Rubie, but Mazie is a major stumbling block.

It's the very start of another step along the journey for both Marylin and Kate as they seek to define their friendship, discovering more about the person each girl truly is becoming. Marylin's first day of school will not be remarked upon by both parents at the dinner table. Since they split up, she will call her dad, who is a great communicator face to face. But when Marylin talks to him on the phone, he seems distracted and she can hear telltale computer sounds as if he's reading email while speaking with her.

As the year continues, Marylin works hard not to be friends with the really strange Rhetta Mayes, who draws fabulous fairies in her notebook but dresses in a big black blouse that looks like a garbage bag and has chalk-white skin and black-eyeliner-circled eyes. Meanwhile, Kate is writing songs and unwittingly discovering a faint glimmering of romance (it is refreshingly realistic to find that the boy in question has layers --- and not all of them are completely appealing).

This is another wonderfully engaging tale of the pleasures and pains of tween friendships from Frances O'Roark Dowell, who never missteps relating Kate and Marylin's points of view. The story strikes so close to home, and is so poignant, that readers may find themselves gulping down a sob or two, even while smiling with pleasure --- and in recognition.

--- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Courtesy of Teens Read Too, February 5, 2009

By 

TeensReadToo "Eat. Drink. Read. Be Merrier." (All Over the US & Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (Hardcover)

The friendship adventures of Kate and Marylin continue in THE KIND OF FRIENDS WE USED TO BE. The girls were in sixth grade in THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF GIRLS, and now they are in seventh.

Marylin continues to hang out with the cheerleaders, although she is gradually beginning to realize that the controlling Mazie does not always have her best interests in mind. When Marylin meets Rhetta, the new girl, she never dreams that they could have so much in common. Rhetta's gorgeous anime drawings of fairies remind Marylin of the stories she constantly imagines but never has the courage to put down on paper. Their unlikely friendship gives Marylin the inspiration to stay a cheerleader but not follow the crowd just for the sake of following.

Kate also makes some new and different friendship connections. Who would have guessed that Flannery, who just a year ago had made Kate feel so awful, could possibly become someone with whom she can share some of her most personal thoughts with? When Kate decides to move from an interest in basketball to taking up the guitar, Flannery provides the support and encouragement Kate needs. Kate also finds another musical kindred spirit when she meets Matthew Holler. He is not like the other boys. He recognizes her need to be something other than a girly-girl, and he really listens and cares about the song lyrics she feels driven to create.

Both Kate and Marylin realize their friendship will survive the test of time, but they also realize that they will both need other friends to support them as their interests and needs change.

Once again, Frances O'Roark Dowell tells a story that will connect with middle grade readers. She covers the topics of struggling friendships, divorcing parents, and the need to be an individual - all subjects that complicate the growing up process.

Both THE KIND OF FRIENDS WE USED TO BE and THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF GIRLS would be excellent additions to any middle grade classroom or library.

Reviewed by: Sally Kruger, aka "Readingjunky"