Bindy Mackenzie is the smartest girl at Ashbury High. While she may not have many friends, she goes out of her way to help the other students at the school through advisory sessions, she has had many plans in order to make money from her students, and she is highly devoted to school work, piano lessons, the debating team, and her part time job. Year Eleven introduces a new class to the school curriculum – Friendship and Development – and Bindy is stuck with a group of classmates that she doesn’t get along with too well after the first session. From there, her year continues to fall apart with her forgetting assignments, failing exams, getting fired from a part time job… And then when she finally opens up to her Friendship and Development group, they have the theory that Bindy is being poisoned, and are determined to find out who is behind all of this.

Oh, I enjoyed this so much more than The Year of Secret Assignments. While it isn’t a sequel, it does take place at the same high school with some of the same characters in it (though the main characters in The Year of Secret Assignments have much smaller parts this time around). It was positively brilliant! So funny, and so moving. I will admit that I had tears in my eyes at more than one part in the book.

Bindy, oh what can I say about Bindy… she was an intellectually brilliant person, and yet such a socially dumb person. She tries so hard to get along with people, and to make friends with her schoolmates, but oh! She has a habit of saying the worst possible things that she can. And she is so awkward around them. Plus, she is different, and you know how teens can act towards someone who is so very different from themselves. But she is a gem of a character, there was so much depth to her and her character grew so much throughout the book.

I love the way Moriarty told this story – it is all throughout a series of transcripts, journal entries, philosophical musings, corespondences and quotes from old books that Bindy has read. (Are all of her books told in manners somewhat like this? I remember The Year of Secret Assignments was mostly done through letters and the such…) It worked quite well for a character like Bindy. I also thoroughly it for the fact that it didn’t completely explain everything all at one time, but rather alludes to it until it comes up in a conversation – for example, Bindy is living with her aunt and uncle currently, and her brother is living with a friend going to an acting school. All we know is that there is something going on with Bindy’s brother that their father doesn’t know about until the fact that he’s going to acting school is brought up in a conversation. It gave you much to wonder about as you were reading the book.

I’m definitely going to have to keep my eyes peeled for Feeling Sorry for Celia, another one of Moriarty’s book that also takes place at Ashbury High.