I loved this book! I thought it was interesting that the main character's mother named her after the really vivacious character in "The Color Purple," but gave the less colorful name to her sister, which seemed kind of backward. Shug (aka Annemarie) is a twelve-year old going into the 7th grade. She likes her best friend Mark but has never been able to tell him so and since school started again, everything has started to change in her personal and school life, which she hates. She wants things to go back to the way they were, but she is growing up and moving on. An example of this is on page 144, when Shug says "Come to think of it, things were easier when it was just me and Mark, too. But the old me and Mark, without any of the love stuff. Life was simpler. Life was riding bikes and kickball and cherry Popsicles." I know exactly what she means there as I had a similar situation with a boy in middle school. I met him in 6th or 7th grade and we were best friends, only somewhere along the way I got a huge crush, but he never noticed me as a girl, just as his friend. Then when we got to high school, he was too cool for me and yeah, broke my heart a bit. So I can totally relate to her after her 7th grade dance, when she overhears Mark saying on page 220, "Annemarie? Come on, she's barely even a girl," and is totally crushed.

One of the first things that jumped out at me about this book was Shug's description of pretty and plain girls as compared to butterflies and moths. She says on page 11 "It's like moths. They're the same as butterflies, aren't they? They're just gray. They can't help being gray, they just are. But butterflies, they're a million different colors, yellow and emerald and cerulean blue. They're pretty." I've always loved that word "cerulean," its's a great descriptor.Later on at the end of Chapter 11, Shug is talking about letting friends you knew in elementary school go and says on page 74 "It's like trying to shimmy up a rope with a moose tied to your ankles. You've just gotta cut that moose loose." I just thought that was hilarious. The author is really good at putting in references that most twelve-year olds probably wouldn't use, but with the quirky Shug, it seems possible. Like when Celia knows of the play "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus" because her sister was supposed to read it and she compares being paired with her worst enemy as "a Faustian bargain (minus the blood part)."