A teacher I have respected for years is including Nice and Mean on her summer reading list (wow!  I’m honored!  And–grad school friends will laugh hysterically at this–the other choice is Tangerine!*)  When I alerted my can-do publicist of this exciting development, she rushed the teacher some classroom copies.  And when they reached the classroom, the teacher in question sent me this:

Don’t the kids look cute?  They’re my exact audience!  And some of them actually look interested in the book! 

As you may know, I have a Nice and Mean fan page on Facebook, less because I think I deserve fans than because I want to let for acquaintancey Friends to opt out of hearing every last development.  The Facebook page has taken on its own personality, and she (I think of it as a she) feels like she looks pretty good in that picture!  The “mean” really pops out of the cover, if she does say so herself! 

Not to mention, of course, that she’s so psyched to be touched and held by readers!  She’d been held when she was an ARC, of course, but it wasn’t the same.  There were embarrassing typos, including a manglification of one of Jess’s advisors names (Tim Wynne-Jones became Wynne Jones).  And since she’s been turned into a book, she’s had to spend several weeks sitting in a cold warehouse.  Now, however, she is finally getting a taste of warmth and love and the smell of contraband bubble-gum, and she is loving it.

Thank you, nice teacher lady, for making my day!

* Why the Tangerine pairing is funny: after teaching this book to my own seventh-graders, then studying the book for craft, I became such a rabid fan that any time a grad school classmate asked for suggestions of a book that did a particular thing–used landscape as character, or showed a great personal transformation–I’d say, “Oh!  Tangerine!”   There was almost nothing that Tangerine couldn’t do.  And it is a great thing to be honored alongside it.