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Down in the Dumps

Neel, Julien
 Lou's school year is off to a rocky start. Her BFF, Mina, won't speak to her, but new friend, Mary Emily, never shuts up. Is it any wonder that Lou is down in the dumps?
Publisher: [United States] :, Lerner Publishing Group :, 2012.
ISBN: 9781467701594

Branch Call Number: eBook hoopla
Characteristics: 1 online resource data file, rda
Additional Contributors: Burrell, Carol Klio
 

owlet99999955 Dec 23, 2016

I found this story fun yet a little sad. What Lou is going through is very sad. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ JCLChrisK Apr 30, 2013

It seems I stumbled onto Lou! not realizing this was volume 3 until I sat down today to read it. I almost set it aside until I could find volumes 1 and 2, but then I found the board-game-style summary of Lou's previous story on the front end pages. It was impressive in its level of detail, brevity, clarity, and humor, so I decided to keep reading.

I'm glad I did. This volume covers a school year of thirteen-year-old Lou's life, autumn to spring, as she deals with all the normal, mundane things her life brings, including what the clueless adults in the book call a severe adolescent crisis.
"I don't know how to say this . . . I had a little freak-out . . . This big emptiness. I feel a whole lot better now. But it was like I always felt like crying . . . I dunno . . . Like I was waiting for something to happen . . . And then nothing . . . Nothing at all . . . Nothing but a sort of miserable void . . . But . . . I don't know if you get it . . . "
Friendships, school, her mom and her mom's boyfriend, letters from the guy she met over the summer, all of them are important yet none of them seem to matter. It might be easy to think from Lou's blond hair and pink dress on the cover, the hearted exclamation point and girly colors, that Lou is shallow and materialistic, but that's not the case one bit. This book has complex, realistic, sympathetic, and engaging characters from start to finish.

I plan on reading the rest of the series and am going to be hunting for readers to recommend it to.











