YOU'RE A BRAVE MAN, JULIUS ZIMMERMAN

In her sequel to Losers, Inc. (1997), Mills allows Julius to emerge as something of a sad sack—he’s convinced he can’t do anything right, that his mother doesn’t like him, and that he has nothing to offer—but he’s wrong. Following some low grades for Julius at the end of sixth grade, his mother has decided that a good foundation for seventh grade will include summer mornings in French class, afternoons baby- sitting toddler Edison, keeping a goal-setting journal, and reading in his free time. Instead of meeting his mother’s goals, Julius accomplishes a few of his own: forming a friendship with Octavia, toilet-training Edison, and showing his mother that he doesn’t have to be similar to her to succeed. His mother, painfully pushy and disappointed in Julius for most of the book, experiences a last- minute change of heart when other people inform her of her son’s accomplishments and of his capacity for caring. Bathroom humor aside, there’s little evidence of a relationship between Edison and Julius; when other signs of Julius’s big heart—a scene in which he comforts Octavia and his selection of a gift into his French teacher—are pushed into the story, the manipulations of the author erode what readers already know: Julius is a really great guy. (Fiction. 8-12)