STILL JUST GRACE

When a new boy moves in next door to her best friend Mimi, third-grader Grace worries that she will lose her friend, but Mimi worries, too, because in the course of a school project Grace works with two of the other Graces in her class and discovers they’re not so bad. Deceptively simple and reader-friendly, this uses gentle humor to explore issues important in elementary-school lives. Named by her teacher “Just Grace” when it turns out there are four girls with the same name in the class, she finds a positive way to let the adults know how she dislikes it. The author nicely contrasts the classroom teacher, a no-person, with the new intern, part of the yes-person group in Grace’s eyes. Grace illustrates her story of changing classroom relationships and a three-day trip to visit her grandmother in Chicago with her own cartoons. This welcome sequel to Just Grace (April 2007) will be just as good an introduction to this engaging character. (Fiction. 7-10)