The Flip-Flop Year: A Tale of Teachers, Tormentors and Tomatoes

There are two things Jane Johnson dislikes passionately--tomato stew and her new teacher, Miss Eldora Coffin, the meanest teacher in Lowry School. An unhappy fifth-grader sentenced to serve out her school year in a mixed class of fifth and sixth graders, Jane is befriended by Richard Whitcomb (Dick to his friends), the most popular boy in Lowry School. But Dick has a flip side and he unexpectedly turns on Jane, harassing her at every opportunity and making her life a nightmare. Jane thinks his bullying is her fault and endures it until he finally goes too far. Help comes from two unexpected sources--one human; the other vegetable--exposing Dick for the bully he is and revealing his dark family secret.Set against the backdrop of wartime America in the waning days of World War II, The Flip-flop Year deals with such themes as bullying and integrity; rationing and the war effort, while chronicling the flip-flop relationships of ten year-old Jane Johnson with her teacher and Richard.

＂Help!＂ says author June Gossler Anderson. ＂I’m a ten-year old girl trapped in the body of a seventy year-old woman!＂ She confides that she was channeled by her school-age alter ego to write this fictionalized memoir of her grade school years. Born in Nordeast Minneapolis, the author attended Thomas Lowry School, kindergarten through eighth grade. Three of her four children also went to that school until the family moved to the country where they raised horses and chickens and pigs. (Oh my) Now that her children are grown and gone, she grows tomatoes in the summer, cans them in the fall, and writes stories the rest of the year while vacationing in ＂her past.＂