Dear Reader,

As a kid, I used to poke around in tumbledown barns and sheds, especially in rural Maine, and if I happened to spot a rusty ax-head or a broken doorknob or some strange chunk of brass or iron or glass, it was like a treasure to me, and it would follow me home. As those who know me today will tell you, I still can’t resist old tools and odd bits of this and that. My office is loaded with all kinds of interesting and semi-useless stuff that I’ve found or bought over the decades.

Many years ago I worked in an old textiles mill that was soon to be remodeled into apartments, and my company was the last one still in the building. One day as I looked through some junk left in a hallway, I found a box of buttons—blue, gray, and brown, all about the size of a quarter. There were probably two or three hundred buttons of each color. So I took them home and gave them to our young sons. Instantly all four of them went bonkers about buttons.

The boys divided them up (mostly by grabbing, as I recall), and then those buttons were used as money during card games, for creating strange sculptures with wire and thread, for bartering and trading, and, of course, for throwing at each other. The blue buttons mysteriously became more valuable than the brown ones, and the brown ones were more prized than the gray. There was a lot of arguing, a lot of hoarding and hiding, and there were many loud accusations of unfairness and greediness and outright robbery. And then, after only six or seven days, everyone moved on, and those beloved buttons were nothing more than a nuisance littering the floor of the basement playroom.

During the seven years I was a classroom teacher, I saw a number of fads come and go—Mexican jumping beans, Pet Rocks, mood rings, Wizzzer tops, and Star Wars action figures, to name a few. And during the years our sons grew up, my wife and I saw many more fads arrive and exit, from Pokémon cards to Beanie Babies to Silly Bandz. But when I got the idea to write a story about a fad at a middle school, the first memory that skidded into my head was the way our own kids had reacted to that box of buttons. And the result of this happy mental collision is the book you have in your hands: The Friendship War.

Thanks for taking this little journey with me and for helping to make reading the one fad that will never die!