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Also by Linda Perlstein:

Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives Of Middle Schoolers, September 2004
Paperback

NOT MUCH JUST CHILLIN': THE HIDDEN LIVES OF MIDDLE SCHOOLERS
By: Linda Perlstein

The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers

Ballantine Books
September 2004
On Sale: August 31, 2004
288 pages
ISBN: 0345475763
EAN: 9780345475763
Paperback
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Non-Fiction

Suddenly they go from striving for A’s to barely passing, from fretting about cooties to obsessing for hours about crushes. Former chatterboxes answer in monosyllables; freethinkers mimic everything from clothes to opinions. Their bodies and psyches morph through the most radical changes since infancy. They are kids in the middle-school years, the age every adult remembers well enough to dread.

Here at last is an up-to-date anthropology of this critically formative period. Prize-winning education reporter Linda Perlstein spent a year immersed in the lunchroom, classrooms, hearts, and minds of a group of suburban Maryland middle schoolers and emerged with this pathbreaking account. Perlstein reveals what’s really going on under kids’ don’t-touch-me facade while they grapple with schoolwork, puberty, romance, and identity. A must-read for parents and educators, Not Much Just Chillin’ offers a trail map to the baffling no-man’s-land between child and teen.

Media Buzz

This American Life - October 29, 2011