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
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read.
Will a bully always be a bully?
That’s the question eighth-grade football captain Chase Ambrose has to answer for himself after a fall from his roof leaves him with no memory of who and what he was. When he returns to Hiawassee Middle School, everything and everyone is new. The football players can hardly wait for him to come back to lead the team. Two, Bear Bratsky and Aaron Hakimian, seem to be special friends, but he’s not sure what they share. Other classmates seem fearful; he doesn’t know why. Temporarily barred from football because of his concussion, he finds a new home in the video club and, over time, develops a new reputation. He shoots videos with former bullying target Brendan Espinoza and even with Shoshanna Weber, who’d hated him passionately for persecuting her twin brother, Joel. Chase voluntarily continues visiting the nursing home where he’d been ordered to do community service before his fall, making a special friend of a decorated Korean War veteran. As his memories slowly return and he begins to piece together his former life, he’s appalled. His crimes were worse than bullying. Will he become that kind of person again? Set in the present day and told in the alternating voices of Chase and several classmates, this finding-your-middle-school-identity story explores provocative territory. Aside from naming conventions, the book subscribes to the white default.
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read. (Fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-338-05377-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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