I read this out loud to a fifth grader and a third grader during a long car trip. The fifth grader adored it, which the third grader bobbed in and out. Personally I was less interested, but the intended audience seemed to find it relatable, funny, and engaging.

A big thank you to NetGalley and Perseus Press for the ARC. I am voluntarily reviewing this book. This is a children's book-middle school-8th grade. This was not a book for me. I really didn't like the premise. Revenge isn't the answer and that no one at the school did anything was unfortunate. The parents behaviour questionable at best. I rate this a 2.5.

This is a powerful story of an 8th-grade girl, Pipi going through a lot of stuff at school and at home. She’s holding onto many embarrassments from her past school years and is having a hard time letting go, to the point of being in a negative mindset toward the classmates who have been laughing at her, treating her like she is a virus, and being mean to her (in her eyes at least) since kindergarten, even feeling anger and jealousy toward the ones who haven’t really done that much to her, like Sarah who seems genuinely nice.

Pipi sees Sarah as a bad guy when the book starts because she is best friends and cousins with her main bully Kara. Pipi has to open her eyes and realize that there is more to people than what she sees. She is so focused on all the mishaps that happened to her over the years that she never realized everyone around her are having them as well.

She is so caught up in her humiliations that she thinks she needs to save younger children from having any. She has to realize when she tries to help the younger kids, she is taking away who these kids are and Pipi needs to learn who she herself really is!

There is a full range of emotion being expressed in this book and I enjoyed it fully. I love how funny it can be, but it can be just as sad as it can be hilarious. Annie, who is Pipi's niece, is the funniest 4-year old I've ever read about. This is a fast paced book. It has such heart and a scene or two made me tear up.

This book has every diverse group you could think of (small exaggeration, maybe?) and it works. It doesn’t feel too forced. I’m glad we’re starting to get more diverse children books.

I want to point out that Pipi's school has a strict dress code and it might be a sore spot for some people who are going through or did go through it. It's a very sexist mindset that our schools have. It’s the whole “she was wearing *that* so she was asking for it.” The girls have so many rules, but the boys rules are “must be clean and neat.” It is even quoted in the book that the girls are a distraction to the boys.

There is also some homophobia in this book, so be aware of that going in if that is a topic that would hit close to home.

The book is real. It’s raw. The ending packs a punch. It really tugged at my heartstrings. It’s not just a children book. It is and should be important for all ages.

I really loved this book.

Based on the description of the book I really really wanted to like it, but I just couldn't do it. The concept of wanting revenge against someone and then realizing it's not all it's cracked up to be is not original and this book didn't really add anything new or interesting to it. Pipi is so caught up in everything that has gone wrong for her that she never realizes all of the good things right in front of her. Even after Ricky points this out to her she still doesn't really get it. The plot involving Kara and her threatening to get Pipi's sister fired was a little over the top and actually weakened the story. As for Sarah, everyone looks at her as the paragon of good, but really she's just a bystander to bullying and she never does anything to help those that Kara hurts. Her prank/revenge on Pipi at the end is cruel and it is just brushed aside like it was not big deal. I was also disappointed with the parents in the story - they didn't seem to really have Pipi's back when she's bullied and teased by her classmates and instead just tell her to get over it. They also have allowed her to get so wrapped up in the negatives of her life rather than helping her talk through the problems. The school's complete lack of response to the way Pipi is treated by her peers also rang false.

The Humiliations of Pipi McGee by Beth Vrabel tells the story of one chronically unfortunate middle-schooler, Pipi, as she comes to terms with her repertoire of embarrassments and seeks revenge against those who contributed to them. A definite coming of age story, the book follows Pipi’s ups, downs and learning curves as she discovers who she is and what it means to be cool or uncool.

One of my favourite things about this book was its focus on representation. Pipi’s story is infused with plenty of diversity, I many forms, in a way that normalises difference. Reading the book, I was invested, entertained, included. I felt Pipi’s hurt and embarrassment. Even when I disagreed with her actions, I liked her and wanted her to seek improvement.

Overall, The Humiliations of Pipi McGee shows a lot of promise, and could be a definite middle grade favourite! In its pre-publication state, some of the writing, grammar and formatting (at least for kindle) could use some tightening, and I would have loved a slightly ‘rounder’ ending where Pipi’s relationship with friends Ricky and Tasha was concerned. I look forward to seeing what others think of this book when it releases on the 17th of September, 2019.

no one should bring up seventh grade, ever.

that said, pipi mcgee and her redemption/revenge plan is such an eight grade dilemma and i love it so much. she's a very likeable character, however vindictive. bonus points for cute blended family dynamics, sisterhood rising and the importance of forgiving your friends, but not letting mean people get the best of you. extra bonus points for the artsy nerdy kids bonding. all the former eight grade weirdos and misfits will appreciate it.

We aren't able to read/ review this book because the formatting of the file is messed up. I wasn't sure how to tell you this.

DISCLAIMER: The book is given by NetGalley, the author and the publisher in exchange of an honest review. All the review written is not related to any personal issues or connection.

TRIGGER: Typical story about middle-schoolers. Some scenes will leave you giggling and some will leave you such nostalgic feelings of embarrassment, laughter, humiliations, friendship, first beer, and maybe first love.

"I mean when you're not trying to extract revenge or being completely obsessed with bad things that happened to you, you're fun to be around."

Full review: https://literatureisliving.wordpress.com/2019/03/29/the-humiliations-of-pipi-mcgee-of-beth-vrabel/

Is a fun book and kind of different mostly because is a girl and not a boy who wants to change her life in school. Enjoyed it, but I thought it was a graphic book and not a novel. I would recommend this to children and any other person that enjoy middle grade books like this. I thought is good and fun, but sadly it wasn't 100% for me. Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity, my excuses for the short and not so good review.

Entertaining and engaging read, plausible characters and some genuine laugh-out-loud moments. The doodle-style illustrations break up the text nicely and make the book attractive to younger readers. Some serious issues are tacled discretely within the plot e.g families evolving after a divorce, relationships between peer groups during the transition from primary to middle school. I would recommend this novel to upper Key Stage 2 children who enjoy a lighthearted and amusing read.

This was an entertaining story about a middle school student who seeks revenge on those who she believed has humiliated her in her younger years. I found some of this story to be redundant. I wanted Pipi to move on be my productive. It was a bit predictable at times. I think we have all experienced times of humiliation but don’t preform acts of revenge. I work in a middle school and the students are much kinder in reality. But the book on a whole was enjoyable. I think the YA students would enjoy it and relate to various aspects.

From kindergarten through seventh grade, Pipi McGee has been through some stuff. Mostly stuff that she defines as catastrophically embarrassing or life-alteringly cringe-y. But eight grade is going to be her year. She is going to turn her luck around and make right all of her old wrongs. Unfortunately things don't go quite as easily as planned.

Pipi is the kind of story where you really want to relate more to the lead character but she makes it a bit tough on you. With a tendency for dramatics and a bad habit of always seeing the worst in an awkward situation, Pipi can come across as whiny and a bit petulant. That said, her crew of supporting characters certainly added more depth and dimension to the story, so well done for that.

***I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review****

4.5 stars.

Summary

Eighth grade is going to be the year. The year that Pipi McGee redeems herself from her past Humilations, nose picking, drawing herself as a piece of bacon with boobs, shooting the winning point for the wrong team in basketball and then there's seventh grade...we don't talk about seventh grade. Pipi McGee has a plan to reverse her Humilations, but what happens when it goes to far?

First off,

This book is hilarious! I am definitely buying myself a copy of this when it comes out because, it was so fun to read. I was laughing from page one. I've read a few books of Beth Vrabel's and have really enjoyed both of them and this one was no different. I loved our main character, Pipi she is such a fun main character and I felt like I some aspects that I could really relate to Pipi and how she was feeling in certain situations.

Why I loved it,

This book is the perfect combination of funny, empowering, and silly. I absolutely loved it and I just couldn't put it down. This book is different from other middle grade books that I have read, it has such a unique and funny idea of this character who has had some pretty embarrassing stuff happen to her and she is determined to reverse it. This is a great book about friendship, and revenge...which some can argue is equally as awesome.

This book also has a few diverse characters, Sarah, who we later find out is gay and Eliza who is Pipi's older sister who is teen mom to four year old Annie. This book introduces these characters and portrays them in a good manner. It is always nice to see really different and diverse characters, ecspeially in middle grade.

This book is a good mix of humor and serious-ness. In the book we explore topics like bullying and friendship and we have a character who is discovering her sexuality (our characters are in eighth grade, about to transition to high school).

Age recommendation

Ages 8-13

No explicit content or swearing

Overall

I absolutely adored this book, it was funny and well written. The characters were enjoyable and we'll developed. I loved this and I can't wait to read more of Beth's work in the future!

4.5 stars.

This was a super cute book. Well Written and easy to get into. And I love the cover. I could relate to this character so much even as a grown woman I can remember vividly what Pipi is feeling. This book would be great for anyone struggling with life.

I was really liking this book but I wasn’t really a fan that pipi didn’t learn anything she was basically really mean to her friends to try to get revenge and didn’t get anything to happen to her other then that I really enjoyed the book

<blockquote>"I mean when you're not trying to extract revenge or being completely obsessed with bad things that happened to you, you're fun to be around."</blockquote>

This pretty much sums up this book for me. Pipi is a really annoying protagonist, who is so obsessed with trying to become one of the popular girls, and in everyones good graces, that she doens't notice who she is hurting around her. It is hard to feel sympathetic towards here, which is what you should feel for a main character.

But, if you can get through that, and get through the info dump at the beginning of the book, where we are introduced to her Dad, her StepDad, her teenage mother sister, and her neice of said sister, then it is a decent story.

But, I still like <em>Mean Girls</em> better, who did revenge and becoming one of the mean girls to extract revenge, better.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

Penelope McGee, an 8th grader, wanted redemption and revenge for all the humiliations she suffered since kindergarten - thereby wiping the slate clean for when she moved on to high school.

This story contained a diverse group of characters including bullies and “mean girls” on all levels: students, parents, and educators. Meanness seemed to be rampant in this school environment. For example, after one particular incident when Penelope was on a school trip in fourth grade, she had a bathroom accident when her zipper got stuck. Since that time, Penelope was called Pipi. However, it was not only her tormentors who called her that name, but her best friends and family as well. Her dad’s explanation …the name was catchy. I understand why her tormentors changed her name (because that’s what they do), but had difficulty reasoning why her supposedly support group of friends and family went along with this sudden name change…a constant reminder of Penelope’s humiliation and embarrassment.

Many parts of this story were a bit over the top, but it was geared towards middle grade humor and entertainment. That being said, the smartest person in this story who seemed to know what was going on in everyone’s life, unlike some adults, was Penelope’s four year old niece, Annie. With her superior intellect, Annie offered advice and support, especially to Penelope. However, even with the advice given to her by Annie and others, Penelope found out the hard way that “hurt people hurt people”…and any middle schoolers reading this story should also be mindful of that lesson.

I started out really liking this book, but it developed two major strikes against it. The first was that the ending really went downhill into complete unbelievability for me, so the last twenty percent or so was an unpleasant read. That wasn't the worst part though. The worst was that the main Character Penelope McGee, never ever seemed to learn!

I don't mind reading about a dumb female character if she turns herself around, or if she has some other qualities that come to light, but "Pipi" never changed. As the story went on, she proved herself to be actually worse than anyone she had a vendetta against, and on top of that she proved weak, unassertive, and just completely lackluster, willing to betray friends, family, anyone, to get what she wanted. She was not a nice person and had little thought for the consequences of the poor choices and decisions she persisted in making.

The basis story is that in her last year of middle school, she unilaterally decides she can wipe her slate clean and start high school with a fresh outlook. She determines, against the better advice of her friends to whom she pays little heed, that the only way to do this is to seek vengeance on everyone who wronged her, and try to wipe out her humiliations. She talks like this will be redemption, but she really doesn't act like any of it is. It felt like a real shame to me because some parts of the story were really good, and there was this one nose-piercing scene which mede me laugh out loud, but such meager leavening in a book that is otherwise sinking does far too little to improve matters.

On top of this, her story is presented against the backdrop of what has to be the worst middle school in the entire country. There is no discipline there, the teachers are all either bullies or idiots, and there is absolutely zero parental involvement whatsoever. It's not surprising then that there was open and unchecked bullying going on in this school, which the teachers never did a thing about.

One of the teachers openly bullied the girls, yet there never were any repercussions, for example with parents making complaints about her. The principal of the school was female and all this was going on under her watch, so what message does this send about female competency? It was a disgrace. It was so unrealistic as to be more of a caricature than anything that felt real.

Pipi herself was also a caricature in practice, because everything presented in this story was either stark black or it was glaring white. there was no subtlety here; no shades of gray. On top of that, Pipi had to be one of the most self-centered and ignorant characters I've ever encountered. It was pretty obvious that one of the main characters was gay and Pipi never figured this out at all. She was so self-focussed and self-obsessed that it never occurred to her that other people might be real people with feelings and secrets and problems and worries.

On a technical level, this book was not helped by submitting it to Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process. Personally I refuse to have any truck at all with Amazon for a variety of reasons, but one repeated problem I see with review books that come to me in Kindle format is that they have evidently been submitted to Amazon with far too many expectations for the end result, and the ebook comes back looking like a mess. If the publisher or author doesn't vet the resulting ebook for quality, the review ebook gets sent out to reviewers looking like a disaster.

I see this a lot with a variety of books. In this particular instance, there were page headers and page numbers blended into the body of the text. There was random bolding of text here and there, and all of the images at the start of the book were sliced, diced, and julienned. Kindle does this routinely. You cannot submit a book to Kindle for conversion unless it is the plainest of vanilla - nothing fancy, no images, no text boxes, no page headings or numberings, no tables, charts, or anything remotely fancy. Essentially it must be just plain vanilla text, otherwise Amazon will completely mangle it for you.

Here's an example. At one point I read the following:
Ricky glanced around, nodding at me, then sat (this part was bold. The text line ended here)
next to Tasha. (this was on the next line and was regular text)
Tasha even wore makeup today—something she rarely did—her lipstick and eyeliner a bright turquoise blue. When I asked her about it, she (this was the next couple of lines, all bolded)
said Eliza showed her how to do it. (this, the next line, was back to regular text).

On another page (evidently page 107!) I read this:
It’s just how I pictured Freya.” 1 07 Tasha grinned.
There were also random examples of a bold lower case letter 'f' appearing in the middle of the text like so:
"The dots disappeared.
f
I called Sarah over and over,"
I have no idea what that was all about.

So technical issues aside, I cannot commend this as a worthy read when it has such a limp and misguided main character who never seems to learn her lesson and yet for whom everything magically works out in the end? No. Sorry but no! That's way too much fiction for my taste!

Pipi no longer likes her nickname, and wants to be called Penelope. She is trying to fix all the mistakes she made in elementary school, but is she willing to do so no matter the consequences? Middle schoolers will love and connect with Pipi McGhee!

WOW!!!! This was so powerful.
I did receive this for free from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review so keep that in mind.

This story stars out introducing Penelope or as she’s know Pipi Mcgee she’s an 8th grader who wants to finally break out of her embarrassing shadow. Every year like clockwork something horrible happens and she becomes the laughing stock of the school. But this year she’s determined to get redemption and revenge. But at what cost? Friendships are put to the test, the enemy become an ally and betraying a loved one seemed so easy. Things aren’t always what they seem.


I was very pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed this book so much, I tend to stay away from middle grade reads but decided to get out of my same old patterns and comfort zones and I’m very grateful I did. I wouldn’t of come across something this great.

As with some books, I did find some of it a little ridiculous but I had to remind myself that this is middle grade and with coming of age stories there’s some very childlike decisions. I still think that the story taught us so many admirable and good lessons.

It’s says that it’s okay to be weird, gay, wallflowerish, poetic. Fitting a mold doesn’t have to dictate yourself, love yourself is the important thing.