Book Review: Rebel McKenzie by Candice Ransom

Rebel McKenzie
Author: Candice Ransom
Reading Level: YA/MG
Genre: Children's Fiction
Released: June 26th 2012
Review Source: Hyperion Book CH
Available: Amazon

Summary: (from goodreads) Rebel McKenzie wants to spend her summer attending the Ice Age Kids' Dig and Safari, a camp where kids discover prehistoric bones, right alongside real paleontologists. But digs cost money, and Rebel is broker than four o'clock. When she finds out her annoying neighbor Bambi Lovering won five hundred dollars by playing a ukulele behind her head in a beauty contest, Rebel decides to win the Frog Level Volunteer Fire Department's beauty pageant. Rebel may not be a typical pageant contestant, but how hard can it be? Rebel's dramatic reading about life is the Pleistocene era is sure to blow away the competition. It turns out that winning a beauty pageant is harder than it looks. By the end of the summer, Rebel has learned a thing or two about her true calling that will surprise everyone--most of all, herself.

(3.5 Trees)

Rebel McKenzie is a wonderful book for young middle school teenage girls filled with comedy. Rebel dreams of digging up ancient bones at Ice Age Kids' Dig and Safari, but her parents tell her that it’s too expensive and they can’t afford sending her away. So what does she do? She runs away. The funny thing is that she doesn’t get very far and is brought back home by the police. But Rebel is on a mission, she needs to find a way to come up with the money to go digging. Then she finds out about a beauty pageant. She is so not the type to join a pageant, but she is a girl on a mission and sometimes a girl has to do what a girl has to do. The one thing that she doesn’t expect is that she will learn a lot of things about herself.

Rebel McKenzie isn’t a book I would normally pick to read, but I have to admit that I really enjoyed it. Sometimes it’s nice to read something different. I recommend this to all middle school girls.