Join the Club, Maggie Diaz

by Nina Moreno, Courtney Lovett (Illustrator)

Overview

This humorous and heartfelt middle-grade debut by Nina Moreno with illustrations by Courtney Lovett is perfect for fans of Celia C. Perez and Terri Libenson, and any reader still deciding what their passion in life is.

"MAYBE I'M GOOD AT SOMETHING I DON'T EVEN KNOW ABOUT YET."

Everyone in Maggie Diaz's life seems to be finding their true passion. The one thing that defines them as a person. Her best friends Zoey and Julian are too busy to hang out after school thanks to band and comics club. Mom is finishing her last semester in college. And Maggie’s perfect older sister Caro is perfectly-perfect at sports and tutoring.

So Maggie cooks up a plan to join every club she can! But trying to fit in with type-A future leaders, gardening whizzes, and the fearless kids in woodshop is intimidating, exhausting, and seriously confusing. And juggling homework, friends, and all of her after-school activities is way harder than it looks.

Seventh grade is all about figuring out who you are — good thing Maggie Diaz has the perfect plan!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781338740622
Publisher:	Scholastic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/04/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.63(h) x (d)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Nina Moreno graduated from the University of Florida and writes about disaster Latine teens & tweens chasing their dreams, falling in love, and navigating life in the hyphen. She lives by a swamp outside of Orlando where she enjoys listening to carefully curated playlists, drinking too much Cuban coffee, and walking into the sea every chance she gets. You can find her online at ninamoreno.com.
Courtney Lovett received her BFA in Visual Arts and Animation from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She works in different mediums and artistic disciplines, including illustration, character design, and animation. As a Black American and a native of the DC, Maryland, Virginia area, her work reflects her heritage and upbringing, which adds to today's cultural shift of creating diverse and relatable stories from perspectives that are often underrepresented or misrepresented in art and media.

Editorial Reviews

07/22/2022

Gr 4–8—After a boring summer wishing she was at camp like her two best friends, Zoey and Julian, and having to share her bedroom with her abuela, Maggie knows the start of the seventh grade signals big changes for her. When Zoey and Julian start to spend some of their free time in their new clubs with new friends, Maggie is left feeling uncertain, trying to figure out what she might be interested in. Maggie is sure that if she starts to participate in clubs and gets her grades up, she can finally get her own phone and things with her friends can go back to normal. Volunteering to clean beaches and dabbling in woodworking and agriculture are interesting to her, but she is ultimately overwhelmed with all her activities, letting her mom and friends down. Fun and quirky, Maggie Diaz is a character many readers will relate to as she begins to juggle more responsibilities while struggling with insecurity and forgetfulness. The fast-paced, first-person narration reveals these thoughts to readers, who might easily predict the wave that is about to come crashing down on Maggie. The black-and-white and grayscale illustrations add another layer of fun to this accessible middle grade novel, welcoming even more readers to Maggie's world. The heroine discovers the powerful message that not everything has to be checked off a to-do list, and things don't always have to be perfect. VERDICT A solid addition to middle grade collections.—Selenia Paz

School Library Journal

2021-12-24
Finding oneself is no easy task.

Life has handed Cuban American 12-year-old Maggie Diaz a lot of changes recently. With mom finishing up her accounting degree, a new baby brother, dad traveling for work, and now having to share a room—and a bunk bed—with her abuela, she’s glad she can at least count on her two best friends. Maggie has big plans for a superawesome seventh grade year, all hinging on her ability to convince her mother that she is responsible and mature enough to finally get a cellphone. It doesn’t help that Caro, her 16-year-old sister, is absolutely perfect—a standard that messy and forgetful Maggie feels like she’ll never be able to meet. When her besties seem preoccupied with their own interests, however, Maggie decides to take matters into her own hands and try to discover where her passions lie by joining several school clubs. Becoming overcommitted and (unexpectedly) lonely, Maggie works to tease out her real interests while her plans for a perfect year seem to be crumbling around her. This novel presents an honest portrayal of navigating many of the changes that come with moving from elementary to middle school. Lively, engaging illustrations throughout add detail and visual interest to the narrative. Diverse representation is woven naturally into the story.

An upbeat and humorous look at self-discovery. (Fiction. 10-14)

Kirkus Reviews