Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series, and where particularly Megan and Cassidy were developing strong independent points of view), and more importantly, if the book club's sojourn in Wyoming had been a little less woefully and frustratingly massively predictable. However, I would likely have considered a low three star (and not a one star) rating for Dear Pen Pal if the voices of the narrators had matured a bit from the first and second books (and they really have NOT and in fact, I almost think they are sounding LESS mature and LESS developed than especially in book two of the series where the club was reading and discussing L.M.

And yes indeed, even the main underlying thematics of Dear Pen Pal, the newly mandated school uniforms and the students' rejection of and their fight against this dress code is really almost laughably standard and thus massively run-of-the-mill for me (as it is a much too commonly used theme in school-based children's literature). But I guess my main reading appreciation challenges with this particular story, with Dear Pen Pal and, to be fair, with the entire The Mother-Daughter Book Club series so far, are for all intents and purposes that the plot lines do seem to simply and mostly move and meander from one potential and often standardly overused issue of young adult, of school-time concern and disaster to another, always framed with and by classic and conventional bully and bullying worries. I actually finished Dear Pen Pal, the third instalment of Heather Vogel Frederick's The Mother-Daughter Book Club series (and where the club is discussing Jean Webster and especially her novels Daddy Longlegs and its sequel Dear Enemy) a couple of years ago, and then promptly forgot to review it (perhaps because while definitely to a small extent enjoyable, the novel is also and once more rather too stereotypical in many ways, with especially Lily Wong again being presented as a very intensely one-dimensional stock and cardboard like eponymous vegan 'activist' character, although I do have to admit that she does become just a trifle more developed, nuanced and human by the end of Dear Pen Pal).

Dear pen pal by heather vogel frederick