Being Bindy

This is a nice, fairly lightweight story about Bindy, who is in the 7th grade. Her parents are divorced and her mother has visitation with Bindy on weekends, but they don't get along very well.

Bindy's best friend is Janey, but Janey falls in with a group of girls and turns on Bindy, tricking her into a makeover and setting her up for an unplanned date. While at the movie Bindy sees her mother with another man.

Bindy gets more and more shut out by Janey and the group of girls she run's with. Bindy's mother is quite nasty to her, and worse yet Bindy and Janey find out that Bindy's father and Janey's mother (who is divorced) have had sex.

This forces Janey and Bindy to try to work out some plan to keep their parents apart since they definitely don't want to live with each other. Later it becomes apparent that Janey is now into drinking and even smokes marijuana.

Things get even worse when Janey has a party with her group in Bindy's room while she's away with her mother, trashing her room and defacing a favorite poster of hers. The trouble gets even nastier than that, though, when it turns out that the group of girls have taken some of Bindy's panties and throw them around during a school assembly.

The confrontation was inevitable, and in the principals office the principal tries to get to the bottom of things. The pressure on Bindy doesn't let up, as her mother wants her to move in with her and her new boyfriend; Bindy finds out the majority of the money supporting them comes from her mother and pretty much the entire school is now just waiting to jump Janey and the group of girl's she hangs with over the panties episode.

Bindy has to find some way, then, to deal with her mother, her father, her former best friend, her new friend, a would-be sort-of suitor at school and her brother at home. It's quite a challenge for the young girl, to say the least.

A good book, at times funny, at times upsetting. Worth reading.

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