All Alone in the Universe

When her best friend since the third grade starts acting as though Debbie doesn't exist, Debbie finds out the hard way that life can be a lonesome place. But in the end the heroine of this wryly funny coming-of-age story—a girl who lives in a house covered with stuff that is supposed to look like bricks but is just a fake brick pattern—discovers that even the hourly tragedies of junior high school can have silver linings, just as a house covered with Insul-Brick can protect a real home. This first novel shines—fun, engrossing, bittersweet, and wonderfully unpredictable.