Get a Job, Kid

Children’s Books It’s 1972, and Cindy Copeland is mired in adolescent misery as she enters seventh grade. The cool girls are wearing patched jeans and feathered bangs, but her mother dresses her in Dust Bowl-style pinafores and sensible shoes. She gets an anxiety stomachache walking into the school cafeteria, reluctant to take her place beside the other social rejects. Most painfully, her best friend has dropped her to join a clique of ruthless popular girls whom Cindy refers to as “predators.

” In Cynthia L. Copeland’s graphic memoir CUB (Algonquin Young Readers, 223 pp. , $12. 95; ages 8 to 12), deliverance comes to her younger self in the form of a vocation.

Noting Cindy’s fluid writing and powers of observation, her English teacher steps in, apprenticing her to a junior reporter at the local daily newspaper, The Torrington Register. Cindy’s new mentor is Leslie, a caffeinated young woman in granny glasses, who whisks her off to such exhilarating assignments as the finance subcommittee meeting of the Board of Education. “This is so cool,” Cindy breathes, clasping her reporter’s pad. She walks out some hours later with a traumatized expression on her face, after flailing in a sea of incomprehensible bureaucratese, unable to extract a single coherent thought from her notes.

As a former cub reporter myself, all I can say is, word. The idea that finding the right job can solve a person’s problems is not one we tend to promote, especially to children. But this is exactly what happens to Cindy. The work frees her.

When she’s armed with a notebook and camera, the anxiety stomachaches go away and she is at ease, even bold. At a school board meeting, she calls out a top administrator for padding the school superintendent’s salary — “I have it right here in my notes! ” — setting off a chorus of outrage from the adults.

“And this success at one thing, journalism, seeps into every part of Cindy’s life.”

She agrees to go steady with a boy, someone she, in accordance with local custom, completely ignores in school. She discovers that she doesn’t care what the popular girls say about her. She has found a way to be herself. In both its story and its buoyant artwork — the groovy coloring was done by Ronda Pattison — Copeland gets so many things right.