Delaney loves softball; Chelsea hides in the locker room during gym class. Delaney is into storytelling; Chelsea prefers to hide behind the lens of a camera.

Delaney is human. Chelsea exists only on the pages of a preteen novel.

Yet something that happened to Chelsea midway through "Lake Rescue" struck a chord with Delaney. A chord that, in the long run, may save Delaney's life.

When Delaney turned 10 more than a year ago, she went in for her annual physical. Her pediatrician was blunt: You're about 20 pounds overweight, your blood pressure is high and your cholesterol isn't good. The term "prediabetic" was used. It is an increasingly common diagnosis for someone her age: In North Carolina, one of every 3.5 kids is overweight, according to the Trust for America's Health.

Delaney's parents, Lee and Lisa Rosen of Cary, enrolled their daughter in the Healthy Lifestyle Program at Duke Children's Hospital. As part of her treatment, she received behavioral counseling, nutritional guidance and close monitoring of her problem areas.

She and 30 other girls in the program were also given a copy of "Lake Rescue," a book with a carefully crafted message that the girls apparently heard.

Not enough 'strong, healthy' messages

Addie Swartz was facing the typical dilemmas of a mom raising two preteen girls in a world dominated by role-model images of sex and materialism in the mass media.

"I felt there weren't enough strong, healthy messages for girls in this age that we refer to as tween -- between toys and boys," says Swartz, who ran an educational software company at the time. "They're just not developmentally ready for this."

So she founded B*tween Productions with the goal of producing various media -- books, primarily -- dealing with the issues girls 9 to 13 face, from bullying to cliques to body image. Its flagship endeavor: the Beacon Street Girls book series.

On first read, the BSG books seem much like other books aimed at preteen girls: A tight-knit group of best-friends-forever battle the travails of seventh grade. But read closer and you discover these girls are a little different -- or normal, actually. One has an autistic older sister, one's mom is battling multiple sclerosis, another has mild dyslexia. Divorce is the rule rather than the exception.

And while the books bear the name of a single author, they're a collaborative effort. Swartz says an editorial board roughs out an outline of each book, which they send to various experts.

"In the case of 'Lake Rescue,'" says Swartz, "we had five experts: a nutritionist, a clinical psychologist, a social worker, a pediatrician and a 12-year-old girl with borderline Type 2 diabetes."

The outline and expert input are given to the author. Once the manuscript is completed, the book is resubmitted to the panel for comment.

"Embedded into each story we have important messages about body image, about healthy lifestyle, about nutrition," says Swartz.

Anecdotally, feedback to the series -- now up to 16 books with 700,000 copies in print -- was good. But Swartz craved more concrete evidence that the books were having an impact.

In the summer of 2005 she read an article about childhood obesity by Dr. Terrill Bravender, then at Duke. In it, Bravender, who has since left the university, wrote that doctors are often poor role models themselves: They're either too thin because they don't eat enough or they're fat because they don't eat well, Swartz recalls the article saying.

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