BEEN CLEVER FOREVER

Stephen A. Douglass is too smart for his own good, as he gets ample opportunity to demonstrate in his first semester at Cable Hall High. Widely thought to be instrumental in having a junior-high teacher fired, Stephen's bad rep is considerably enhanced when he's (wrongly) blamed for trashing his bio lab--so much so that (at the instigation of dazzling, manipulative classmate Peggy Klecko) he runs for sophomore class president and wins by a landslide. His fame spreads when he puts on an ""angry young student"" act for the local evening news and catches the attention of a documentary producer, who sends a crew to follow him around, filming a ""typical"" day at school. Of course, Burton Truelove, a teacher already known to be ""bull-goose looney,"" picks that day to go completely over the edge. . . Continually trying to escape the constraints of other people's expectations, Stepphen blunders through this mad farce--plus a maze of subplots--in a sort of detached confusion á la many of Paul Zindel's characters. Though his tendency to wander off on tangents occasionally slows the story's pace, practiced readers will relish both his irreverence and the delicious chaos that follows wherever he goes.