I HATE MY HERO

Rachel's sixth grade is producing a video news program. Her popular best friend, Cherry Hill, has one of the coveted anchor slots, while Rachel is stuck with researching and writing. Finding newsworthy events is difficult until Rachel chokes, Cherry Hill rescues her with the Heimlich maneuver, and the camera just happens to be running. When the story is picked up by local TV, the AP, and People magazine, Cherry Hill's quick thinking makes her a celebrity. With Cherry Hill enjoying the limelight and Rachel's humiliating predicament replayed ad nauseam, the latter's gratitude is tempered by resentment. A thoughtful and entertaining novel—realistic in its detailing of preadolescent social jockeying and the minutiae of class politics—that involves readers in questions of journalistic ethics and the nature of friendship. Changes in the major characters are delineated subtly and believably—Cherry Hill gets progressively more affected and shallow as she is lionized, while Rachel (a ``quiet, brainy type'') becomes more assertive and self- confident and is finally able to relinquish a friendship that she had valued chiefly as a hedge against social insecurity, and to form others based on shared interests and values. (Fiction. 9-12)