Center for Teaching & Learning

Amanda is dreading her upcoming eleventh birthday. One year ago, she and her life-long friend, Leo, are suddenly not best friends anymore.  Amanda runs home distressed and angry from her and Leo’s joint tenth birthday party and is found on her front steps crying. That was the tenth of the eleven birthdays they have shared together as friends, and this will be Amanda’s first birthday party without him.  After not speaking to him for a year, she thinks she can handle it.
Her fears are right; it’s not such a great birthday after all. Her best friend betrays her; she struggles with terribly difficult test in class; her mother is fired from her job; and her sister thinks Amanda is up to no good. She can’t wait for the day to end to relax. But when she wakes up the morning after, her eleventh birthday happens all over again! The day repeats and repeats until Amanda and Leo are able to sort out their problems and be friends again. It turns out that Leo has some problems of his own too.
In this hilarious and touching adventure, Amanda becomes “unstuck” from re-living her Friday birthday with the help of a bus driver with a duck-shaped birthmark, her best friend, and by remembering clues from her past birthdays. There is more than one way to get to Saturday.
I rated this book a ten because as in most of Wendy Mass’s books (A Mango Shaped Space, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life), it has many thoughts and feelings of both the main character and other minor characters in the story. Anyone who enjoys fanciful mysteries and hilarious teen-issues books about friendship and loyalty will love this first-person-narrated book.  It is very detailed and has a lot of description on every page. Wendy Mass portrays Amanda as a funny, brave, future drummer for the school band, and not at all fond of gymnastics.
Josie
Publisher:  Scholastic, 272 pages