THE DEFENSE OF THADDEUS A. LEDBETTER

Twelve-year-old Thaddeus A. Ledbetter has landed himself in In-School Suspension for the rest of the school year for performing his own safety drill at Crooked Creek Middle School.  Feeling that typical fire drills don’t really test preparedness for real-life emergencies, he devised a drill that involved a killer-bee alert, pulling the fire alarm and shouting about old people driving cars into the school, and the response included seven police cars, three fire trucks and several pest-control vehicles. Gosselink’s debut novel is Thaddeus’s defense of himself, typed on the school’s laptop, mixed with letters to and from friends and relatives, notes from the principal, diagrams, helpful advice for running the school more efficiently and “Fun Facts,” which are often definitions and derivations of words he uses from his extensive vocabulary. It won't take long for readers to realize that Thaddeus is as weird and annoying as the students and faculty think he is, but there is something endearing about him, too, as readers will glean from the lively assemblage of documents. (Fiction. 10-14)