Tag Archives: bully

340Z: A bully/mean girl and a cupcake/birthday cake

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This is a children’s picture book I read in the 1980’s. The protagonist “despises” (I think she uses that word) a mean girl/bully. In the end I think she discovers that the bully doesn’t have any friends and is sad, and would like to be the protagonist’s friend. There is also a cupcake (it might have a candle on it). I think the bully gives it to the protagonist to try and make friends but the protagonist is suspicious of it and wonders if it’s poisoned. The bully wears a frilly dress. I think at one point she has a lollipop.

237B: Companion Novels from the 80s: The Victim’s Perspective, The Bully’s Perspective (Solved)

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In the early 90s or late 80s, I remember reading two novels for kids. They were both about a boy being bullied. One was from the perspective of the victim and one from the perspective of the bully. I can’t find them anywhere. The only other detail I can remember is that some of the bullying took place in the neighborhood. It’s a fuzzy memory and maybe I dreamed it. Maybe it was only a chapter or two in the same book even. I was sure it was Blume or Cleary but I searched their books and couldn’t find anything like this. I do know that Wonder has a new companion novel from the perspective of the bully but this is clearly different. Thanks!

227G: A book with an alternate ending

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It is middle school aged, maybe 5th and 6th grade, and very much like a Beverly Cleary book, and it was in the mid to late 60’s that I read it. You flipped it upside down to read the alternate ending, which had a different cover. I loved it back then because it showed that bullies and the bullied are not so much different. The boy had a major challenge…to play in a school concert, it was either a bugle or a trumpet, and that was the end of both versions of the story.

I’ve looked all over and it seems not to be Beverly Cleary. I know I read it about the same time I was reading Beezus and Ramona.