Sometimes, breaking the rules is the best thing you can do, especially when the rules don’t allow you to be yourself.

For Nadine Rostraver, fourth grade comes with peer pressure and new social rules. For one thing, girls aren’t supposed to hang out with boys anymore. So where does that leave Nadine and her best friend Nick? Then Summer Crawford arrives at their school and Nadine’s life goes from bad to worse! Nadine loses her job on the class newspaper and gets in serious trouble with her teacher. But Summer has always been a free spirit, and together Nadine, Nick, and Summer realize that life is a lot more fun if you march to the beat of your own drum.

Leslie Bulion’s sensitive, realistic look at adolescence will resonate with young readers who will recognize themselves and their own dilemmas in her well-drawn characters and their responses to a complicated world.