AMBER BROWN IS NOT A CRAYON

As Amber tells he, teasing third-grade classmates, she's not a crayon color but a girl — messy but well adjusted, lucky in a teacher who makes a game of studying other countries, trying to forget that best-friend Justin is moving to Alabama as soon as his parents can sell their house. When they do, Justin and Amber — whose own parents' divorce makes this new separation even more painful — fall into a silly quarrel; still, with a little sympathetic encouragement from the adults, they realize that its true cause is their dejection about the move and make up just before Justin leaves. The familiar story is nicely individualized in Amber's buoyant, authentically childlike narration; it's grand to have Danziger add books for younger readers to her many popular titles for the older crowd. (Fiction. 6-9)