"The trouble all started right before the first day of sixth grade, the last time Franklin and I played Knights.
"Knights works like this: we get our swords, we head out to the woods, and we go on chivalrous missions to battle ghost knights.
"Uncle Hugh made our wooden swords when we were six, which is when we came up with the game. Franklin's mom wasn't happy about him making us weapons, but Uncle Hugh assured her that the worst that could happen was we would get splinters -- and that's only happened a couple of times.
"We never really battle each other.
"Or, at least, we never had before."
I don't believe that there has been anything more perplexing in my entire life than having been a later-to-mature firstborn trying to navigate the social maze of middle school. First, there was all the name-calling and being shoved up against the lockers for no reason, and then there were all of these boy-girl couples my age acting so mature. And all of the fashion rules. I'd always been a good student. How did I miss learning what so many others seemed to know?
"To make everything one hundred times better (not), who should show up but Sir Franklin, needing to stick up for me.
"'It's no big deal, she just got hurt playing Knights.'
"'What's Knights?'
"'It's a pretend game.'
"Amanda smirked. 'Playing pretend. That sounds really cool.'"
For having been orphaned young and raised by her Aunt Bessie and Uncle Hugh, eleven year-old Elise Bertrand seems to be a pretty well-adjusted girl. That is, until she begins middle school where she is quickly labeled by popular Amanda for showing up in unfashionable attire, with scabs all over her legs, and for being best friends with the equally later-to-mature, content-to-be-a-kid Franklin.
Elise is so unhappy about her traumatic first days of middle school that she just wants to forget about school after the dismissal bell. She fails to do homework and begins purposely missing the school bus. Her Aunt and Uncle help her get on course, but when the bullying and name-calling continue, she decides that her continuing friendship with Franklin is the problem, and she throws it away. On top of all this, Aunt Bessie's young sister and her newborn baby move in, making Elise feel that she's losing all of the special one-on-one time that she's always been used to getting.
Then she finds a key hanging in the barn with her name on it. Might it unlock one of the eight doors upstairs in the barn to which she's never had access? What could be behind those doors?
EIGHT KEYS is a stellar coming of age story that reveals the struggles that Elise undergoes in trying to navigate middle school.
I think about what it might have been like, had someone told me in advance to expect middle school to include being called names and having my books repeatedly shoved out from underneath my arm in the stairwell. To expect to be teased about my clothing choices. To expect to see boys and girls glued to one another in the hallways and cafeteria. None these strange things existed the previous year in my comfortable elementary school.
I think about what it might have been like, had someone explained to me that there wasn't something inherently wrong with me to cause my being subjected to these things, that the bullies themselves had the problem. That I just needed to find and to be myself.
This is what Elise has to figure out, and the manner in which she comes to learn it is why I would have loved getting to read EIGHT KEYS before I began middle school.
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