Former fifth grade teacher Andrew Clements, according to the author blurb in this book, has written over eighty books for children, mostly fiction and mostly set in school classrooms. He’s the master of the “school story”, and his most famous book, Frindle, has sold over six million copies to date. The Friendship War, Clements’ newest novel, is about friendship, but also about how a fad, like pet rocks or cootie catchers, gets started and how it grows. Strangely enough, or maybe not so strangely, Frindle is also about trend-setting and how an idea, or a fad, gets started and grows and becomes uncontrollable.

The story begins with Grace and her grandfather who discover a stash of thousands of buttons in an old mill that Grampa is rehabbing. Grace wants the buttons, and Grampa gives them to her. Then, it’s back to school and Grace’s longstanding friendship with the popular Ellie, a friendship that is about to be tested by the accidental beginning of a fad—a fad for buttons.

This story about friendship and about buttons is Clements’ best since Frindle. Grace is a great character, something of a collector, a thinker, and as her new friend Hank calls her, a catalyst. And these sixth graders are just at the age where a new fad in school can show them important things about themselves and about their friendships, if they are paying attention. Clements handles the dynamics of sixth grade friendships well. Grace’s new friend Hank doesn’t turn into a boyfriend or a crush, although there’s some very mild teasing about that from Grace’s grandfather, which seems perfectly in character. There’s a conversation about life after death between Grace and her mother that gives food for thought without being didactic. And the whole story is just deftly handled and insightful in regard to friendships and social groups and the life cycle of a fad or trend.

Middle grade readers will enjoy this story and probably make connections to fads and trends in their own experience. There is also a lot of wisdom in the book about friendships: how to initiate them, how to sustain them, how to repair broken friendships, what makes a friendship worth working for.This book is one I would like to add to my library, and that’s high praise since my shelf space is limited to only the cream of the crop.