This big, fast-moving tale of students who unite to take a stand against bullies and find friendship in the process is a...
Five middle school students come together to orchestrate the downfall of a school bully.
Adam Baker, a white eighth-grader at Anderson Middle School, is tired of being bullied by Principal Parmer’s son, Hill, the kind of smarmy kid who is late for school every morning, bullies half of the kids in school, cheats on every test, and copies homework. The kid who tapes “kick me” signs on classmates, throws kids against lockers, and dumps milk on people’s lunch trays. Adam finds four students who have been victims of Hill’s abuse to join him in concocting a plan to bring Hill down. What might have been another not-so-funny middle school melodrama of pranks and social meanness becomes a heartwarming tale of necessary revenge exacted through an ingenious scheme. The five co-conspirators—all victims, all reluctant outsiders in the school’s social cosmos—come together and find friendship and a sense of belonging with one another. The five new friends’ stories are told in short, alternating chapters, each related as a tightly focused third-person narrative. The kids emerge as fully rounded characters; of particular note are biracial black/white Pearl, who has a list of microaggressions as long as her arm, and detention-magnet Dutch, who has a facial tic and lives with his grandfather.
This big, fast-moving tale of students who unite to take a stand against bullies and find friendship in the process is a keeper. (Fiction. 8-14)Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-239730-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A memorable story of kindness, courage and wonder.
After being home-schooled for years, Auggie Pullman is about to start fifth grade, but he’s worried: How will he fit into middle school life when he looks so different from everyone else?
Auggie has had 27 surgeries to correct facial anomalies he was born with, but he still has a face that has earned him such cruel nicknames as Freak, Freddy Krueger, Gross-out and Lizard face. Though “his features look like they’ve been melted, like the drippings on a candle” and he’s used to people averting their eyes when they see him, he’s an engaging boy who feels pretty ordinary inside. He’s smart, funny, kind and brave, but his father says that having Auggie attend Beecher Prep would be like sending “a lamb to the slaughter.” Palacio divides the novel into eight parts, interspersing Auggie’s first-person narrative with the voices of family members and classmates, wisely expanding the story beyond Auggie’s viewpoint and demonstrating that Auggie’s arrival at school doesn’t test only him, it affects everyone in the community. Auggie may be finding his place in the world, but that world must find a way to make room for him, too.
A memorable story of kindness, courage and wonder. (Fiction. 8-14)Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-375-86902-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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