Who are the main characters in Frindle by Andrew Clements?

The main characters in Frindle are Nick Allen, a fifth grader, and Mrs. Granger, his English teacher.

Nick Allen is a clever, creative kid.  In third grade, he got his brand new teacher in trouble by turning his classroom into a tropical island.  In fifth grade, he is annoyed that he has to do homework.  He tries to stall his English teacher, who is famous for giving long vocabulary assignments where kids have to look up words in the dictionaries.  As a result, she gives him a report on the dictionary and he learns how words are invented, and invents his own.

Frindle was a real word.  It meant pen.  Who says frindle means pen?  “You do, Nicholas.” (ch 7, pg. 38).

Soon, the word gets out of Nick’s control.  He gets in trouble, and then it becomes a national phenomenon that he created a word.  He just wants things to be back to normal.  After that, he does not want to have ideas any more.

Mrs. Granger is a fifth grade English teacher.  Since it is a small town, and she is the only English teacher at Lincoln Elementary, she has had most of the kids in the town in her class.  She takes her job seriously, and considers it part of her responsibility to build their vocabulary.

Words are used to think with, to write with, to dream with, to hope and pray with.  And that is why I love the dictionary.  It endures.  It works.  And as you know now, it also changes and grows. (ch 15, pg. 100)

Mrs. Granger does not really hate new words.  She just does not like how Nick threw away the old one.  She tells him she has written him a letter that she is going to give him when things are over.  In the letter, she explains that she just wanted to have a role in the adventure, and decided to play the bad guy.  Ten years later she sends it to him, along with a dictionary containing his word.

What are some relationships in Andrew Clements's Frindle?

One strong friend relationship found in Andrew Clements's Frindle is between Nick Allen, the protagonist, and Janet Fisk.

We are introduced to Janet in the opening chapter when Nick performs a science experiment in class by chirping like a red-wing blackbird. He had learned on TV that red-wing blackbirds let out very high-pitched chirps any time they see hawks. Due to the nature of the way sound travels, the hawks are unable to tell where the chirp is coming from, so they go off hunting in the wrong direction. After noticing his fourth-grade teacher looked like a hawk, Nick decided to see what would happen if he let out a high-pitched chirp like a blackbird. Sure enough, his teacher couldn't tell who made the chirp, and she accuses Janet, who nearly cries. The narrator explains Janet is one of Nick's frequent playmates in the neighborhood, and Nick clearly admires her a lot:

She was good at baseball, and she was better at soccer than most of the kids in the whole school, boys or girls (8).

Since Janet is his good friend, Nick feels badly that she was yelled at by their teacher, so he apologizes and explains to her what he had been doing. After that, Janet joins in on the experiment, and their teacher is never able to figure out who is making the noise.

As his close friend, Janet is with Nick the day he gets the idea to call a pen a frindle. She is also the fifth kid, or "secret agent," who puts into action Nick's plan to convince others to call a pen a frindle by walking into a store and asking to purchase a frindle (34-35). As one of Nick's "secret agents," she is with him, along with other kids, when he asks them to take the oath to use the word frindle instead of pen.

Though Janet is not mentioned many times throughout the book, we can tell by Clements's characterization of her that she is a very loyal friend of Nick.