NICE LITTLE GIRLS

It's no wonder that Jackie, who shows up at her new school in short hair and overalls, decides to call herself a boy; Mrs. James has mistaken her for one anyway, the other children have teased her about it, and what's worse, she finds that only boys are allowed to help with the movie projector or build a box with the carpentry tools. But her new identity has its problems too, as Jackie discovers when she finds herself facing a row of urinals in the boys' room, and after a talk with her parents she is so assertive about being a girl who can build a box that she wins an admiring friend in Susie, one of her former tormentors. Of course its all blatantly didactic and Susie's turnabout unconvincingly sudden, but Levy makes Jackie's distress real enough and sometimes funny, and Gerstein takes any trace of heaviness out of the message with his nifty cartoon sketches of the boys and girls.