Emma-Jean Lazarus

About the Emma-Jean Lazarus series

Long before she was sending kids into hurricanes and shipwrecks for I Survived, Lauren Tarshis wrote this quieter, character-driven duology about Emma-Jean Lazarus, the smartest and strangest girl at William Gladstone Middle School. Emma-Jean prefers precise observation to social small talk, and her classmates mostly leave her alone -- until she witnesses a popular girl crying in the bathroom and decides, with the same clear-eyed logic she brings to everything, to fix the problem herself. Her matter-of-fact interventions into other people's messy feelings and friendships end up changing her own place in the school more than she expects.

The books are frequently read as gentle, non-clinical explorations of neurodivergent-coded difference (Emma-Jean is never diagnosed on the page, but her rigid logic and discomfort with ambiguous social cues read that way to many readers and educators) wrapped in a warm, funny middle-school comedy about friendship and fitting in. It's a marked tonal departure from Tarshis's disaster-survival work: lower stakes, slower pace, and much more interested in the interior lives of ordinary seventh-graders than in dramatic peril.