Celebrate the first day back with cupcakes, friends and great conversation with children's author, Jen Calonita.  Her middle grade Fairy Tale Reform School series is a BIG hit with grades 3-6.  Great news for parents- it is also an AR book!

When petty thief Gilly, who lives with five younger brothers and sisters in a run-down boot, gets caught stealing, she is sentenced to three months at Fairy Tale Reform School, where all of the teachers are former villains, including the Big Bad Wolf, the Evil Queen, and Cinderella's Wicked Stepmother. Harsh, but when she meets fellow students Jax and Kayla, she learns there's more to this school than its heroic mission. There's a battle brewing and Gilly has to wonder: can a villain really change?

It's no secret how Jen Calonita knows the inside scoop on Hollywood. A former entertainment editor at a teen magazine, Jen started out her career chronicling backstage life at concerts with Justin Timberlake and interviewing Zac Efron on film sets. It was her work in the entertainment world that inspired her first series, Secrets of My Hollywood Life. The six-book series is about a teen starlet named Kaitlin Burke who grows weary of the fame game, but loves being an actress and it's been published in nine countries.

Jen usually likes to write about worlds she knows so she moved on to camp life in the books Sleepaway Girls and Summer State of Mind (since she was a camp counselor as a teen), then tackled reality TV (which she also covered in magazines) in Reality Check. It wasn't until she wrote Belles, which is about two polar opposite girls who share one life-altering secret, that she entered a world different from her own.

It was so much fun creating a new world that Jen jumped into a fairy tale one for her first middle grade, Flunked, which is the first book in the Fairy Tale Reform School series. Fans will love getting to know spunky Gilly and the enchanted reform school she attends run by Cinderella's formerly wicked stepmother, when the first book comes out March 2015. It will be followed by another middle grade series called VIP in early 2016. The first book, I'm with the Band, is a diary-eye look at life on the road with the world's biggest boy band as told by their number one fan, Mackenzie Lowell.