My suggestion for a good book to read on Shabbos afternoons is a bit unusual—it’s a series that my Abba read when he was a kid. (I won’t tell you how old he is, but the 18-book series was published more than 30 years ago!)

Leah Klein’s “The B.Y. Times” is about a group of Orthodox Jewish girls who start their own newspaper. Each book is filled with fun and adventure, and the girls often have to overcome challenges in interesting ways.

In the first book, Shani Baum, a talented eighth-grader, wanted to do something special for her last year at Bais Yaakov. She saw her father reading the Bloomfield News, a local newspaper, and came up with the idea to start her own newspaper with her friends at school.

It is very exciting to read about how Shani puts together a newspaper staff with help from a faculty adviser. Things aren’t simple though, and tough situations arise. For instance, things get a little tense when Shani and her friend Raizy disagree about whether to publish a special article without approval from their teacher. You’ll have to read the book to find out what happens next!

Every book has new conflicts and adventures. In book 4, one staffer and her parents travel to Israel for a simcha and the first Gulf War breaks out. The book details their experiences during the war and it is extremely interesting to learn what things were like. In book 15, there are a lot of secrets going around. But some of them are making people very angry. In book 17, Chani Kaufman goes off to high school and it is up to two staff members to find a whole new staff. It seems as if nobody wants to run the B.Y. Times. But what happens when you promise the same job to two people? My favorite book is “Party Time” because Chani Kaufman runs color war but her team doesn’t seem to listen to her. Pinky Chinn, a good friend of Chani’s, helps her and talks with her to make everything work. Will Chani’s team win color war?

Leah Klein not only keeps you engaged with her exciting plots, but she also has very detailed descriptions of her characters and scenes. It makes me feel as if I were right there in the book. For example, in book 15, Klein describes Nechama, one of the staffers, as “a slight girl with auburn hair and a smattering of freckles across her nose.” There are also great illustrations on the covers of each book, so you can see what the characters really look like.

Another thing I really like about the series is that the last few pages of each book show the finished newspaper that the girls publish together during the story.

Even though this series was written 32 years ago, it is still a great and inspiring series to enjoy today. The books inspired me to start my own school newspapers, and also to write for The Jewish Link. I hope you are inspired by them, too.

Beverly Soloveichik is an incoming sixth grader at Yeshivat Noam.