The blood is like Morse Code, and the receiving organs much like semaphore flags.

“No…you can’t go in there. I forbid it. That is where I keep my clean sheets, and I know what you want them for.”

Do you love Big Brother? Or do you love-love Big Brother?

If you love to hate the popular girl cliques, “Hello Jenny!,” a delectable comedy in which the great junior high club “The Always Friends” face trials and tribulations following the return of a long-lost member. This novel is a sinfully delicious bonbon.

As the story plays out, age-old tricks are played with thirteen year old hijinks. A purloined letter is now a source for jealousy and blind rage. Instead of people hiding behind doors and in closets, we get the transformation of a large abandoned Victorian and a mother’s new paramour.

Subplots and subsidiary characters multiply. One of the wittiest subplots involves the exiled Always Friends Club president, Jenny, who can’t believe that her friends are fighting over a trip to Lake Tahoe.

Because its structure and the targets of its commentary — jealousy, greed and dishonesty — hark back to Molière, “Hello, Jenny!” offers a reassuring vision of a fixed social order, bourgeois to the core, in which virtue is rewarded and hubris exposed. For all its cynicism about posters, sleepovers and home renovation, it doesn’t rock any boats.

In between are high-flying birds like Cricket, a free spirit, fending for herself. She may have few illusions, but she still has enough integrity to recognize and respect the decency of her fellow Always Friends in deception.

Of books deploring the quality of junior high political discourse, the most compelling is Girl Talk: The Winning Team.

Sabrina Wells, with curly auburn hair and a bubbly personality, loves magazines, shopping, and talking with her friends. A distinguished liberal thinker, she says with patent insincerity that she thinks Stacey Hansen will follow in her principal father’s footsteps as a model junior high leader.

But with as much intellectual honesty and energy as Sabrina can muster (which is a lot), she starts at square one in search of general principles that everyone in seventh grade ought to share, and then moves on to specific policies that her lunch table can argue about.

“It suddenly occurred to me that a presidential campaign was almost the same as putting on a show,” remarks Sabrina, at the beginning stages of her campaign against the formidable incumbent. “And what is really cool about this show is that I have the starring role.”

Sabrina faces courageously up to “the new politics of Bradley Junior High” in which sentimental populism, fueled by the fiery speeches of her rival, seems to be owned by the right to blow-drying one’s hair exactly the right way…every day. Although Wells clearly regards this as terribly unfair (as do I) and a result of voters’ failure to know their own self-interest, she manages to make her argument for more “quality control” in seventh-grade democracy in ideologically neutral terms.

Wells’ campaign and public relations manager, Randy Zak, a New York City native who has just moved to Acorn Falls, is cool with her spiked haircut and her hip New York clothes. Speaking eloquently in mysterious acronyms such as “ASAP”, picked up by her rock video producer father, beautifully voices her concerns about the platform of their political rival:

“We have to deal with the issues. We have to let the students know that there are things Sam and I can do for Bradley that Stacey isn’t even considering. I mean, just because she gave out free pens doesn’t mean she cares about the seventh grade. We can show people that we DO care.”

A challenging tale of political scandal; the trials and tribulations of an underdog with a penchant for seltzer water, and the toppling of a dynasty.

Structured like a triptych, “It’s A Girl Thing,” a story about 15-year-old Holly, is an elegant work. It begins with a very religious high school freshman’s acceptance in a choir trip to Washington, DC – which happens to fall on the due date of the birth of her sister, which would require her to relinquish her dreams and babysit her younger siblings. Its central — and much longer — section focuses on her nearly-thwarted romance with a California boy, Sean, a fellow choir singer and devout Christian. The final chapters rejoin the young lovers at the FBI building, and their mutual admiration for both Jesus and good pizza.
One of the strengths of “It’s A Girl Thing” is Holly’s struggle with her bratty stepbrother Stan, an irresponsible teen who feels raising children is “woman’s work,” in reflection of Adam’s tilling the soil and Eve’s tending Cain and Abel. His refusal to take part in helping with the family prevents Holly from fulfilling her dream of being a star on the Washington stage. This is a setting that resonates with the loss felt by Lewis’s characters. Deftly interweaving the varying manifestations of grief and absence in these diverse lives, she illuminates the ways people devise — or stumble across — their strategies for maintaining emotional equilibrium. As the plot progresses, the sounding and resounding of loss and consolation becomes increasingly affecting, like the deepening elaboration of a fugue. The sacrifies made for Holly to go to Washington with her choir, to accept a suitable mate through the will of God, and to find love with her devout California lad balance this novel nicely.