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QUIT IT Marcia Byalick Paperback | Yearling | February 2004 | $5.50 | 0-440-41865-8 | Ages 8-12

Carrie can't help the fact that she constantly clears her throat, pops her shoulders, and blows her nose—these are uncontrollable tics that are symptoms of the disease Tourette Syndrome. Knowing it drives everyone around her crazy, including her parents, she tries to keep them in, but that usually causes the tics to become even worse. As hard as it is for her to deal with, Carrie's hates the fact that her parents act like nothing is wrong at all. When Carrie is offered the opportunity to join the Lunch Bunch, a group of kids who meet with the counselor at lunch each day to talk about their lives, Carrie thinks this would be a chance to not only help herself come to terms with her disease, but also for her best friend Clyde to work through some of his problems as well. The only problem, however, is that Carrie needs her parents permission to join the group, and the last thing Carrie wants to do is bring up her disease in front of her parents. Forging her mom's name, Carrie joins the group, meets Rebecca, and the two girls begin spending every weekend together. Even though Rebecca is mean to Clyde, Carrie tries to overlook it, because she's never really had a friend that she could talk to about “girl things.”

When the counselor tells Carrie she wants to talk to her parents about her progress, she races home to tell them about the club and why she lied to them before the counselor has a chance to call. When her parents find out that she's gone behind their backs to join this club, they are forced to face what is really going on in their daughter's life.

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Prepared by Brenda Day, Library Media Specialist, Crowley Middle School, Crowley, Texas

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