When sixth-grader Gene Tucks moves from Up North, she dreads being the new kid at school and almost everything else about her dull life as a “nobody.” But what she dreads most is the hundred-day journal-writing assignment her teacher has given the class. His brilliant idea is to have the journals locked in the town museum’s vault for forty years so that future sixth-graders can read them. Gene has trouble writing to someone who isn’t even born yet, but little by little, Dear Nobody becomes Dear Somebody, who evolves into Dear Toni. Toni, as it turns out, is a good listener and a best friend to whom Gene can tell everything. And there’s a lot to tell – some of it funny, some of it sad, and all of it far from dull.

Through Gene’s one hundred entries and funny drawings, a whole story unwinds and in the end, just like Toni will in time, we meet one of the freshest, funniest characters to come along in decades.

Dear Toni has the look and feel of a journal, but the heart of a special eleven-year-old.