You Can’t Sit With Us is an honest look at bullying from the victim. Which I found to be absolutely true. I actually had to stop reading a few times because the main character, Ginger, was about the same age as me as when I had to deal with being bullied – it hit a little too close to home so I had to take a break and a moment to realize it wasn’t happening to ME anymore and hoped that if I was able to overcome it, Ginger would too.
Ginger’s Mom died when she was in 1st grade and her Dad’s job has forced them to move many times in the past 12 years. There is now a “Code” at the school where the students all agreed to not bully each other – except one mean girl who is great at acting and of course, has her minions. Of course they make Ginger their target and unlike my bully stories they have the internet, email and twitter to help try and make her life miserable.
Mean girl Kylie threatens to spill just HOW Ginger’s Mom died (in a car accident even Ginger doesn’t know the details of) if she doesn’t stop hanging out with Ginger’s clique. Not knowing how to handle it she tries to listen to their demands – and fortunately gets an alternate english assignment which brings her to meet Colin to help be her support system while this is all going down.
Fortunately for Ginger this has a better ending than my bullying (but hey, my life isn’t a book that had a lesson at the end. At least not yet anyway) and it seems like her Dad has found a job that will have them sticking around for a bit longer.
I liked the tips that were given to the girls in this book in how to try and get the bullies to leave them alone without causing a scene and I think that if there are girls in the 12year old range getting bullied at school they should read this book to try and find a few ways to deal with it. Some of the tips were given to me as well – and I have to say they don’t always work – but another tip in the book was to keep trying and hope that eventually things would change.
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About the Book
Bullying doesn’t end in the hallway anymore-with a smartphone or tablet, it can happen anywhere.
According to the Ambassadors 4 Kids Club, one out of every four students is bullied-and 85% of these situations never receive intervention. Parents, students, and teachers alike have amped up discussions on how to solve the bullying problem for a networked generation of kids.
Written by bestselling author, Nancy Rue, each book in the Mean Girl Makeover trilogy focuses on a different character’s point of view: the bully, the victim, and the bystander. The books, based on Scripture, show solid biblical solutions to the bullying problem set in a story for tween girls.
You Can’t Sit With Us tells the story of Ginger Hollingberry, a new sixth grader at Gold Country Middle School. Ginger has been the brunt of teasing and taunting from the queen bee of GCMS, Kylie Steppe, and her so-called Wolf Pack. Kylie and the Pack favor a new and especially hurtful medium of taunting: social networking. What follows is a candid look into the growing world of cruel cyberbullying, showing kids that bullying doesn’t always end at school-it can now follow you even into your home and torture 24 hours a day.
Katie 
I thought this was going to be a cute kids book in the vein of “If you give a mouse a cookie” and it was not. Perhaps better suited for those who are fans of Elephants.
