These two books have a lot in common:
1. Both are fiction, written for middle school age children, specifically twelve year old girls.
2. Both books feature a twelve year old girl as the protagonist.
3. Both are first novels for their respective authors.
4. Both stories are told in first person, present tense, which I found a bit odd. Especially in Shug, there were switches from present tense to past tense which were awkwardly handled. Is telling the story in present tense a new trend in YA fiction? I suppose it gives a sense of immediacy to the story, as if the reader is experiencing the action of the story along withe narrator instead of hearing about what happened in the past from an older and wiser teenager.
4. The themes are similar: first love, a family with secrets that are embarrassing, popularity and the struggle to fit in and be liked.
5. The plots are even similar: Girl meets boy, Girl makes friends with boy by helping him, Girl also befriends cool new girl in town, family problems embarrass Girl, Girl hurts boy’s feelings, they make up. A dance is the setting for the climactic action of both novels.
6. Both books have been nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction, which is why I ordered them from the Harris County Library and read them.

So why did I like Rules so much and find Shug to be depressing and discouraging? I read Shug first and all I could think about throughout the entire 248 pages was how sad and difficult and hopeless Shug’s life was. I analyzed this feeling of gloom and realized that it wasn’t, as I would expect, because of Shug’s alcoholic mother that her life was so grim; it was because of the grim, cutthroat realities of middle school life. The Pecking Popularity Order is alive and well in Shug’s town and in her school especially. All the children in the book, who should still be playing games and squabbling over ice cream and dress up clothes, are instead worried about popularity, their first date, their first kiss, and who’s the prettiest. The children are cruel to each other, and although I’m under no illusions about how mean twelve year olds can be, I found the verbal cruelty in Shug to be particularly sad and if it’s true to life in the twenty-first century middle school, I’ve found another reason to homeschool.

If I wanted to be particularly harsh with myself, I could question my judgment and say that I liked Rules better than Shug because I find autistic children more sympathetic than alcoholic adults. However, there’s more to my preference for one book over the other than a preference for one problem over another. The children in Rules were sometimes unkind to one another; they made mistakes and needed forgiveness. But there was so much more grace in Rules; Catherine, the heroine of Rules, apologizes to the person she hurts because she is sorry, not because, like Shug, she’s calculating how unpopular she will be if she doesn’t apologize. Catherine loves her autistic brother, David, and shows it, even if she does become exasperated with the difficulties and embarrassments he brings into her life. Shug, on the other hand, has pretty much given up on her parents, not without reason. Shug’s reality should be more hopeful than Catherine’s; alcoholics do recover and become sober while autistic children don’t usually become un-autistic. Nevertheless, Shug’s only hope is to avoid her parents long enough to grow up and move out, but Catherine comes to a kind of peace about her brother and learns not to make his problems hers while still loving and communicating with him on his own terms.

If you want to read or recommend a middle school problem novel, I’d suggest Cynthia Lord’s Rules. Of course, it didn’t hurt a bit that one of the symptoms of David’s autism is that he uses the words of Arnold Lobel (Frog and Toad) to express his thoughts and feelings. Frog and Toad are much more fun than middle school back-stabbing.
And I like Catherine’s self-made rules: Pantless brothers are not my problem.

“I am laughing at you, Toad,” said Frog, “because you do look funny in your bathing suit.”

“Of course I do,” said Toad. Then he picked up his clothes and went home.

Another take on Shug from Jen Robinson at JKR Books.