about the world. She's also strange. Extremely strange, in the best sense of the word. The other seventh-graders don't understand Emma-Jean. But that's okay since Emma-Jean doesn't understand them either. Their behavior is so illogical. And thus their lives are extremely messy. Emma-Jean dislikes disorder of any kind, and has always considered it prudent to keep her distance from her peers, to observe from afar. Until one day when she walks into the girls' room at school and finds Colleen Pomerantz sobbing at the sink. Colleen is nothing like Emma-Jean. She's one of those girls who cares about everything and everyone--sometimes it's too much! She's always wondering if someone is mad at her, or if she has egg salad stuck in her braces, or if her new sneakers make her look like a complete dork. Mainly Colleen wonders why people just can't ask nicer. And now Colleen is sure that the meanest girl in school is trying to steal her best friend. What happens when these two girls meet? What happens when Emma-Jean tries to solve Colleen's problem using the awesome powers of logic she learned from her mathematician father and his hero, the legendary French logician Jules Henri Poincare? Emma-Jean's life gets messy, that's for sure. Everything comes crashing down, including Emma-Jean herself. But maybe, in the end, it's all worth it.

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