Oh, aimed-at-tweens books featuring tween characters doing tweeny-age-appropriate things, how I do love you.

Sixth-grader Molly is really not happy about things. Her dad is going to get married again (her mother passed away years ago) to a woman Molly and her best friend Tanna call The Claw. The Claw has changed her basketball-loving, Chinese food-ordering, hanging-around-the-house, don’t-ever-call-me-Mitch-my-name-is-Mitchell father into an organized activity- attending gourmand Mitch. The Claw has no idea how to act around kids (she treats Molly like she’s six) and doesn’t seem to particularly like them, either.

Molly was already having enough difficulty adjusting to the difference between fifth and sixth grade: co-ed lunches, switching classes every period, and the fact that she was apparently supposed to now be throwing herself at boys were all giving her some trouble. Add into that the Frizz (her problem hair) and her complete ineptitude in P.E. class and you can see that the last thing Molly needed was to hear Mitch and the Claw singing the Wedding March.

The Claw takes over most of the house for wedding plans, and Molly and Tanna’s daily afterschool hanging-out session is banished to the basement – where the Claw has “helpfully” set up an arts and crafts station that would be more at home in a preschool than with two sixth-graders. Out of frustration they begin digging around in the antiques that the Claw stores down there, and they make a bonanza of a discovery: a machine that accurately predicts who a person will marry.

Molly is horrified by what the machine predicts for her own future, but is more concerned when it confirms that the Claw will be her stepmother. What happens when she tries to change the results (and when the word gets out around school about the machine) makes for some truly excellent reading.

I could hand this book to anyone. There are never enough books like this. I enjoyed Wollman’s previous book Switched but I hope she sticks to tweens now because tweens need her. There are some serious issues in this book but it never becomes depressing; there’s a lot of lighthearted moments in this book but it never becomes fluff. I know my former bookstore is going to sell this like mad.

As soon as this book is published in January I am buying it for my cousin’s 11 1/2 year old daughter. She is going to love it.

Preorder at Powell’s or find your local independent bookstore.