CANDY APPLE SERIES

The Candy Apple series was published by Scholastic from January 2007 to April 2011. The four year run produced thirty books by sixteen different authors, some working in pairs.

The books are aimed at tween readers with the female protagonists mostly being eleven, twelve and thirteen years old. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of diversity here. Only one book has a black main character, while a couple others have black best friends in the cast. Two books feature Hispanic main characters with a few more in the friend cast. But that's it.

I recently reread the entire series, because I'm about to put it into storage and I wanted to reread them before they go. I'll be following up this post with another on the Poison Apple and Rotten Apple series, both of which have a similar style of writing, but with supernatural elements thrown in.

Most of the Candy Apple books are stand alones, but there are three series within the series.

Miss Popularity, Miss Popularity Goes Camping, and Miss Popularity and the Best Friend Disaster follow Cassie Knight, a dynamic redhead who moves from Texas to Maine and experiences some amusing culture shock. Her best friend Etoile is one of my fave characters from the entire Candy Apple series. The author, Francesco Sedita, sadly has not written many other books.

Lisa Papademetriou's Accidentally series is my favorite from the whole set of thirty. There are four books: Accidentally Fabulous, Accidentally Famous, Accidentally Fooled, and Accidentally Friends. These books have the strongest cast of characters and I think Papademetriou's the strongest writer of the bunch. She wrote a few of the Disney Fairies chapter books I love, so I might be a tad biased though.

The summer-themed trilogy of Wish You Were Here, Liza; See You Soon, Samantha; and Miss You, Mina was written by three different authors, but the books link all three friends together as they go on their separate summer vacation adventures. Liza's is my favorite of this trilogy with Mina's in close second. Samantha's is the weakest of the four and also moderately annoying to me, because she's randomly chosen "goth" as her new look after turning twelve, but she hasn't a single clue what goth actually is.

These three series are the best of the bunch, I think, as well as Papademetriou's other contributions. I did also enjoy The Accidental Cheerleader, Juicy Gossip (by Spacepop author Erin Downing), and Winner Takes All.

Check out Candy Apple if you want some fun, but pretty predictable, quick reads.