HEY, NEW KID

Cody has just moved, and he's not taking it very well. After all his pleas to stay home from the first day in his new third grade fail, he reinvents himself as Super Cody, child genius and expert on everything. When this, predictably, backfires, he must learn to adjust to his new school without all the heroics. Duffey (Utterly Yours, Booker Jones, 1995, etc.) has created parents- -especially the father—who are ciphers and a boy who comes across as so self-pitying that it will be hard for readers to imagine what his old friends saw in him. It strains credulity that, at an age when a great deal of energy is spent on avoiding humiliation, a third grader would stupidly set himself up; it's even less believable that his classmates would be so uniformly kind, understanding, and sympathetic about it. Abrupt and didactic. (b&w illustrations, not seen) (Fiction. 7-10)