Jade Levy is a middle school student who is tired of friends coming and going in their little town. When her dad gets cancer, she needs a best friend more than ever. She has always loved writing so she decided to create a best friend that would never leave. When a classmate helps Zoe become alive, Jade can’t believe it! Zoe is everything she imagined! Jade quickly realizes being in control of Zoe’s story isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and maybe she needs a differently type of friend after all.
Friend or Fiction was a sweet book that read very quickly. It dealt with some emotional topics but in a easy to relate manner. I would have loved for more direct references to childhood depression, as it is clear that Jade was dealing with this condition. Overall, it was a good read and I would recommend for ages 10 and up. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for this review.

I received an electronic copy from the publisher through Netgalley for an honest review.

Jade is a fourth-grader. All of Jade's best friends moved their town and left her; she is usually very lonely and spends her time writing about having a best friend named Zoe and all the fun things they do together. Her Dad is suffering from cancer and is her number one fan. Her brother Enzo, on the other hand, draws about everybody defeating a super villain. While Zoe is fictional, Jade is overjoyed when one day, Zoe becomes as real and true as her stories, with some help from her classmate Clue. But real life is out of her control and things don't always go as she plans...

This is one lovely story. Jade's family dynamics, the friendship and morality lessons infused within these few pages, and especially the part where Enzo's super-villain is revealed - it blew my mind. Kids would find this an amazing book to learn about endurance and perseverance. The writing style was also beautifully touching. Abby Cooper has penned down a miraculous story, even though sometimes the magical realism element seems to be questionable. I would definitely want my kids to read this book.

Although I get fatigue from so many “serious issue” books that are rampant in middle grade nowadays, the creativity of the story of middle schooler Jade - who invents a best friend in a notebook and then is shocked when a girl with the same name as her imaginary friend moves to town - pushes this into my “should buy” pile. Good for fiction readers who love to write, and also a good book for some lonely kids out there.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Good middle grades novel about difficulties in life and transient friendships.

Jade is going through a rough time, things are less than perfect for her at school and at home. She lives with her family in a no-name town where no one seems to stay for good. When Jade gets a best friend they always end up moving away, so she decides to make up an imaginary best buddy. At home things things are even more complicated since Jade’s dad has been battling cancer.
Things get really interesting for Jade when her imaginary friend becomes real. At first it seems too good to be true, but eventually becomes a great lesson on friendship for Jade.
I enjoyed the story and really liked Jade’s character.
Thank you to Charlesbridge and NetGalley for this advanced copy.

I enjoyed the book and really liked it. Waiting to hear more from the author. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the arc.

A sweet middle grade story—but I was left confused by some aspects.

Friend or Fiction contained some cool themes that I really loved, presented in an original, fun, and upbeat way. It had well-developed characters and a magical, imaginative storyline. However, the ending left me hanging... and not in a positive way.

Our main character, Jade, hasn’t exactly had the best luck with friendships. She lives in a “transient town,” which means most friends don’t stick around long enough to become best friends, something that is a hardship for sociable Jade, who only wants a best friend. So Jade comes up with a solution: she’ll just invent her own best friend. She begins writing about Zoe—the dream best friend, the best friend Jade has always longed for. Her notebook goes with her everywhere, and she can face anything with Zoe along with her for the ride. Safe in the pages of a notebook, she can invent all sorts of wild, fun adventures for her and Zoe, adventures where nothing ever goes wrong and they laugh and laugh for hours.

This was so heartbreakingly sweet and sad at all once. Jade’s vivid imagination is clear and transparent, something I think many will relate to. The concept of wanting a perfect best friend is a relevant concept to middle-graders for sure, and this aspect of the story was communicated fluently.

But then the story takes a magical turn when Zoe is brought to life by another classmate, Clue. Jade has always thought Clue was weird, and never really talked to him, but now she is forced to after he somehow has done this feat for her: Zoe is alive! And at first, Zoe is the most perfectest best friend Jade could ask. She also learns that anything she writes happens; she now has the opportunity to actually live all of her and Zoe’s wild adventures!

But after weeks of manufacturing friendship, and wondering if Zoe would even be her best friend if she had her own choice, Jade must face the reality of friendship. And this is where these themes appear. You can’t control others; you can’t force a friendship. Additionally, that friendship is built off of bad times alongside with good times—Jade has to learn that true friends don’t just laugh and laugh and build a friendship, but that it also involves going through tough situations together, something she never imagined in her notebook adventures. Against the backdrop of desperate, relatable Jade, who is transparently both so sweet and so human, I thought these themes were messages hard to miss—and ones so important for the middle school crowd as well.

The end, however, flummoxed me. Jade makes the bold, and brave, decision to let Zoe go. She has realized that she cannot force the friendship and that she isn’t a good friend if she tries to manufacture friendship. So she lets Zoe go—and Zoe....disappears? With how Zoe was brought to life explained so thoroughly, this sudden lack of detail surprised me. Further, the story ends with Jade realizing Clue is now her best friend. Essentially, the impression was that Zoe was a lesson, something important, but not the most important. And if Zoe had always remained on the page, this would have been absolutely correct. Zoe, in a way, paves the way to Jade’s personal growth and also teaches her about friendship, so she is able to open up to other people (aka, Clue). But the fact that Zoe was actually a person introduced an empathy in the reader that, to me, shook up this theme. Since Zoe was real—where did she go? Was she a real person who had no worth? Was she a meaningless real person? Was she a valuable person, who was easily discarded?

A little more clarification on this magical tone would have cleaned up a lot of confusion for the reader.

To sum it up, I loved the thematics and appreciated the incredible creativity of the author’s mixing of reality and fantasy. However, I felt it needed a little more cleaning up to really make sense to the reader and make the impact desired. 3.5 stars

this book came at an opportune time when I was going through interviews for uni apps and it felt like a warm hug.

things I really enjoyed about this book
1. touching moments that caught me by surprise. I cannot deny the fact that within the first 50 pages I had to put the book away because I felt tears welling up while reading on the train. I loved the family dynamics in this book, I loved how jade's father tried to be part of the family's life as much as possible and coped with his illness through humour and good fun (which hits close to home in many different layers)

2. I really enjoyed the diversity in the book as well, while it was pretty heavy-handed in that sense of telling us (instead of showing) that Clue has 2 dads and one of the Sparkles was wearing a hijab. nevertheless, it was pleasant to know that kids today would pick up this book and be introduced to a world where gay marriages are normalised and racism is not heard of.

3. this development of the plot is subtle. the transition from a happy, rainbows and sparkles friendship when Zoe first came to life to the unhealthy power dynamic between the duo was smooth and natural. at times, I would also wish Zoe would reach out to jade more. their relationship towards the end was so nice and it reminded me of my beloved friend in which we have no judgement and no jealousy.

some things I think could have been done better/ made the story more interesting
1. I wished we could have gotten other character's POV. I think I would have enjoyed listening to clue's and Zoe's side of the story.

2. how Zoe came to life was never properly explained because she did reveal that she was in a car and she was dropped off to the house opposite jade. I wished she had more questions to ask about how she was brought to life, the restrictions, limits and rules.

3. follow-up on point 2, whether the magical pond water only allowed one person to be brought alive at a time was also not explored. although it might be fleeting, I think a short appearance of clue's sister could have been touching and thought-provoking (what would you say to a dead beloved relative?)

4. jade could have given Zoe some parents! or in an attempt to save her dad, wrote 'Zoe found a surefire way to cure jade's dad's cancer'. I think that could potentially involve the adults more and gave more stakes to the story.


overall though, it is a book I would recommend primary and maybe even secondary schoolers as this book delves into the joys and importance of friendship, love and support. hence, it would be a handy guide for readers to forge and nurture strong friendships.

Don’t mistake the long lull between start and finish for anything more than extremely BUSY January. I loved the story of Jade and her family. Jade’s dad has cancer and she doesn’t make friends since they all leave the town anyway. She’s a writer! She writes during lunch and is supported by her teacher. Well one day her sort of friend Clue takes over and suddenly her writing comes true. There is a new girl named Zoe enters her school. Is it coincidence that Zoe is the best friend she has always dreamed
Of having? Read to find out! Fun story about relationships and overcoming obstacles. Well done, Abby Cooper!

This book is about so much more than a girl and her imaginary friend. It also serves as a great lesson for middle school-aged children about what it means to be a true friend to someone. All of the worries Jade has about Zoe leaving her for the more popular girls at school are the same fears that many children experience, especially as they get older. Zoe serves as a way for Jade to not only deal with her fear of being abandoned by her friends, but to also deal with her fears about her father. The parts of the book that directly address Jade's dad's cancer are sad and funny and true to life. As an adult reading the book I picked up on Clue's backstory and motivation for helping Jade, but it may come as more of surprise to younger readers. I enjoyed getting to see Jade and Clue's friendship develop throughout the book. I also really liked the relationship between Jade and her younger brother; so often in stories the older sister wants nothing to do with a younger sibling, but Jade loves her brother and isn't embarrassed by him or his drawings. Again, as an adult I picked up on what the villain in his drawings represented, but Jade's realization was so sweetly written and served as another example of what a great sister she is. Part of me thinks the book could have done with the magical aspect and kept Zoe just as an imaginary friend, but part of me thinks it worked as a plot device.

I highly recommend this book to middle school librarians and teachers. It would be a great way to start conversations about writing, friendship, and family members with cancer or other serious medical conditions.

Sad, but sweet. A good read for upper elementary students anxious about middle school. Jade is a middle school student who lacks friends, has a father who has cancer, and life has sort of been put on hold. A writer's notebook is her only companion, but helpful teachers look out for her and there is happiness. It gets better. It is a message a lot of young people will need to hear before they leave the safety of an elementary school.

This is an odd and lethargically moving story about young Jade whose father is in remission from cancer, and who is so lonely and at a loss in life that she invents a friend for herself through writing down all the pertinent details in her notebook, unfortunately not many details are pertinent to Jade, and she never seems to grasp the import of this. Consequently I grew a strong dislike of Jade the more I read of this and by eighty percent in, I could not stand to read any more of her and I quit the novel.

In writing in her precious notebook, Jade creates a best friend named Zoe, who is so close to her that the two can almost read each other's thoughts. They get along famously, and have the best times together; then Zoe appears in real life, moving into the house across the street, just like in Jade's original story. Jade discovers that whatever she writes in the book happens in her life with Zoe.

The biggest problem with this book for me is that it never went anywhere. Jade did the same kind of things every day even after Zoe showed up. She went through the same motions, and never seemed to grow; never seemed to change. It was Zoe who began to change, going beyond what Jade had written for her. And that was part of my problem with Jade. She was so annoyingly self-centered and focused on her own needs. I kept thinking, hoping, she would start to see the light, but she never did and by eighty percent it had grown super tiresome reading the same story over and over again.

Everything was about Jade and despite getting multiple signs that things were wrong with her relationship with, and control of Zoe, Jade was too dumb to figure it out. Zoe has only what things Jade has written - nothing more, nothing less, and even when Jade learns this she makes no effort whatsoever to set things right. Zoe herself never seems to think there’s anything wrong with this relationship. This held true way past the halfway point in the novel and by then this repetitive pattern was mind-numbingly tedious.

Perhaps the worst thing about Jade though was that she was so selfish that she never thought of using her magical writing ability to help her family. Her kid bother has some issue which is clear from the endless drawings he does of fighting a nameless 'bad guy'. The odd thing is that no one ever thinks this is odd, and Jade shows no interest in that or in helping him by adding something to her magical notebook to ease his concerns. Neither does she once think of helping her father, who admittedly is in remission from his cancer (presumably the 'bad guy' the boy is fighting in his pictures), but who is far from free and clear. It never even crosses Jade's mind that maybe she could fix this - she doesn't even experiment just to see. It's really deadening to read about someone whose mind simply doesn't function intelligently.

Another thing which bothered me is that Jade's English teacher, who commendably encourages Jade to write, actually read one of her stories about Zoe - and this was after Zoe had appeared in real life. Her comment was, "I think it’s so clever how you incorporated our new student into your story," but never once does she ask Jade if Jade had asked permission to write about Zoe. Not only was it really not clever incorporating a real living school friend in a fictional work, it was disturbing that the teacher never even offered so much as a cautionary note about incorporating classmates into your fiction without permission. It’s not like Jade was six years old. She was beginning the pathway to maturity and definitely needed some guidelines about what’s permissible and the importance of choosing the liberty not taken.

Jade is not a very proactive girl. She's very much passive, even when it comes to writing things that she thinks will help her relationship with Zoe. She came across as very shallow and not capable of standing up for herself, even when this really creepy guy at school steals her notebook and refuses to give it back to her for a whole weekend. She simply lets him have it, and never complains to anyone about it. He gives it back to her after the weekend, but she has to ask for it. Her passivity here was disturbing.

If this guy had been her best friend, that would be one thing - there would have been some level of implicit trust, and I could see then that she might let him get away with it, but she didn't even like this guy - in fact, she actively disliked him, yet she let him walk all over her. That's not the kind of girl I like to read about. I don't mind if a character starts out this way in a novel but I expect to see something happen - some change start taking place and when there is literally none in four-fifths of a novel a reader is highly justified in considering DNF-ing the book. I resented the fact that I had trusted the writer to make things happen and so kept reading. I will never get that wasted time back.

There were the usual technical issues with the kindle version of this novel caused by Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process which will, I guarantee you, mangle your book if it has any pretentions beyond being plain vanilla in format and layout. This was obviously another book aimed at the print market without a single thought given to the ebook version, and it showed.

Admittedly it was an ARC which hopefully will improve before publication, but this ebook had multiple issues. A common one is that text lines would randomly end before they reached the right side of the screen and then resume on the next line while other lines go the whole way across the screen as you would expect, and I'm not talking about naturally short single lines, I'm talking about lines in the middle of a paragraph ending prematurely like they have a hard carriage return in the line.

Additionally, there were random letter V's in the middle of the text. I ahve no idea what that was all about but it's typically what will happen when your print version has page headers (such as book title on one side and author name on the other for example). Kindle will put these right into the text, because Amazon doesn’t care. Never has, never will. Why the book would have a single letter 'V' as a header, I do not know, but this frequently appeared in the middle of the text on a line on its own, breaking up the flow of the test, such as:

V
needed a little more time. Maybe you couldn’t rush real happy feelings.
But maybe you couldn’t write them into happen
ing, either. ≈
"I’d like to make a toast,"
Don't ask me what that 'almost equal to' math symbol (the wavy equals sign) is doing there! That was a common occurrence, and I can only assume it’s a section marker where the author used ≈ instead of the more technically correct §. Authors use all kinds of things to denote a break in the text, but Kindle didn't respect this here and it rarely does, so instead of appearing on its own line in the center of the line as it ought, it appeared as you see it above along with the random bolding of that penultimate line!

If Kindle can screw up your ebook, trust me, they will. This process also mangled chapter headings. You cannot use drop caps and expect Kindle to know what to do with them. Amazon will mangle them with relish. So, for example, chapter three was titled 'More Than Zero', and it began with the word 'The' but the 'T' was a drop-cap, so this is what Kindle did to it:

More Than
Z
3
ero
He lunch-is-over bell rang. Still clutching my
T
notebook,
Now that there is some seriously professional mangling. You have to hate literature to design a conversion process that will trash-up a chapter heading/beginning as badly as that. And no one does it better than the Amazon juggernaut. Again, DO NOT submit a novel to Amazon for conversion to ebook format unless it is pure plain vanilla text. Anything more than that, Amazon will destroy it because Amazon hates anything that looks individual or artistic. This is why they have their own format instead of using the standard format. It's because they want to control and homogenize everything, even how your novel looks. Barnes and Noble have their own issues, believe me, but at least they don’t predictably trash your writing. Yet Amazon rules. Go figure!

The Kindle conversion process also likes to randomly bold text as I mentioned, and even turn it red for reasons I cannot explain. The red text in this book appeared right before chapter one began. The random bolding appeared throughout the text as in the example above, where "ing, either. ≈" was bolded for no good reason.

Note that these are technical issues and nothing to do with the story itself, but I think a publisher and an author ought to take it upon themselves to give the ebook version a once-over to see if Amazon has ruined their novel, because Amazon does this routinely in my experience. This is one of several reasons why I personally will have no truck with Amazon publishing my work.

But judged on the story alone I cannot commend this as a worthy read. It was too slow and showed no sign of going anywhere by 80%, and that's when I decided I'd read mroe than enough to give this one a fair chance

A middle schooler in a small town where nobody stays for long, discovers true friendship. After her storybook perfect friend is brought to life, Jade finds out maybe fun and happy all the time isn't perfect. Sometimes what is right in front of you is actually the best friendship.

Actual rating: 2.5

First off, only after I was approved for this book, I noticed that it's described as magical realism, which is obviously problematic, as the author is white so magical realism isn't a part of her culture. It also goes to show how limited publisher's understanding of magical realism is, because adding a fantastical element to your otherwise realistic story does not suddenly make it magical realism. Ugh.

Anyway, that's what I wanted to say about the description of the book. Now onto the actual novel. I found this to be an enjoyable middlegrade, but it was a little bland at times. There was plenty of heart, and I really liked the main character learning what friendship is and isn't and learning to make friends herself. I also loved the sibling relationship and the main character's relationship with her parents, especially her father. But somehow, I felt like something was missing. It all seemed a little straightforward and I feel like the book could have done with a little more plot.

CWs: loneliness, cancer/illness of a parent.

What a sweet story of what friendship means. Jade was so realistic to me. I enjoyed getting to know her.

Friend or Fiction was so much more than I ever expected from a middle grade novel. The theme of friendship versus ownership is such a struggle for middle school students, and Abby Cooper did a beautiful job navigating these feelings within Jade.

This is such a cool book, and it has two levels. One level is that Jade is lonely and so writes about her imaginary friend. Zoe is the perfect friend, and all her stories tell of how perfect she is, how fun she is, and what a good friend she is.

The other level is <em>why</em> Jade has created an imaginary friend to write about, and how Clue notices this, and understands, and so decides to help her by using magic water to bring Zoe to life.

I loved how Zoe was exactly what Jade had imagined, down to not having parents, because Jade had never done that part of the backstory for them.

Then there is the issue of Jade's father having cancer, that is driving her to need to have something good in her life.

I thought the story was only predictable when it came to Clue. But everything else was a delightful surprise, and kodos for not making the Sparkly Girls into mean girls. I am tired of that cliche.

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

This book is well written and the characters are cute. This is a cute and sad book. It is about friendship and family. The pace of the story is good. I would recommend it to anyone and everyone.

Some books are just plain fun, as is the case with Friend or Fiction. The main character, Jade, is an aspiring author who has written herself a best friend, Zoe. She had several real life best friends before, but most people just didn't live in her town for long before moving on to a larger one. Jade's family life is currently tough as her father has been diagnosed with cancer and he loves to hear her stories about Zoe so she keeps on writing them. One day another kid in town tries a magical way to bring Zoe to life. This causes all kinds of excitement and drama but in the end Jade learns something about herself, about how to make friends, and even about crafting a great story. This is book is hard to put down once you pick it up, I kept finding myself coming back to read another chapter and another.

I read this as I teach Middle Schoolers and am always looking for new texts to work with. I enjoyed the story and looked forward to seeing how it developed. As a book for young people it worked well and allows for a lot of discussion around what makes a good friend, how the choices we make affect us and people around us, etc. I enjoyed the developing friendship between the characters and the self awareness that came through. The latter part of the book was fairly predictable but I will not hesitate to use it in our school mindfulness sessions. Thanks for an easy read