The Next Great Paulie Fink by Ali Benjamin

The whole community winds up being better off, in ways she hadn’t previously been able to imagine. Everyone gets the space they need to just be.

You also have to like yourself, to forgive yourself your flaws, and to trust in the path that’s yours alone.īut Caitlyn also discovers something important: that by being herself, she leaves room for others to do the same. It sounds so simple, almost pat, but it’s hard! It requires, first and foremost, knowing yourself-the person you are separate from all the noise that surrounds you. What Caitlyn ultimately learns is the thing that most of us spend a lifetime figuring out: that the trick to finding your place in this world is to be yourself. But the rules have nothing to do with who she is at her core, so her initial attempts find her place only backfire. To reassure herself that she’ll be okay, she even carries a list of “rules,” which will be her guide to fitting in. She longs to fit in, and she’s terrified she won’t. When Caitlyn shows up to the Mitchell School, that’s the place she’s in. Those things appear in entry after entry.

Oh, that yearning! I still have my middle school diary, and that’s the primary thing that leaps out from those pages: my desperation to fit in, to belong…and my constant nagging fear that I don’t. There are many wonderful, relatable threads woven into this book, but particularly poignant in the opening scenes is that adolescent yearning, even desperation, to fit in. 2019 Gr 5-8), is a heartwarming examination of megastars, goats, friendship, and finding your own best self. Ali Benjamin’s sophomore novel, The Next Great Paulie Fink (Little, Brown, Apr.

Plus, it’s not even a real school: it’s housed in a dilapidated old mansion, and her 10 classmates are obsessed with finding out what happened to their legendary classmate Paulie Fink, who, it appears, won’t be returning to school. She had-more or less-figured out how to navigate middle school before her mother accepted a job in Mitchell, VT, in “the middle of absolutely nowhere.” She’s angry about leaving her friends and angry about having to start over. When Caitlyn Breen walks into her rural Vermont school on the first day of seventh grade, she doesn’t know what to expect.

The Next Great Paulie Fink by Ali Benjamin