Back to School: Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life by James Patterson

Okay, so imagine the day your great-great-grandmother was born. Got it? Now go back a hundred years or so. And then another hundred. That's about when they built Hills Village Middle School.

Of course, I think it was a prison for Pilgrims back then, but not too much has changed.

Now it's a prison for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders.

For Raphael (a.k.a. Rafe) Khatchadorian, his unpronounceable, unspellable name is the least of his worries. Unlike the Wimpy Kid, who at least has Rowdy, Rafe doesn't have a best friend, unless you count Leo the Silent, who mostly draws instead of talking to him. His sister is a fourth-grade snoop who is only on his side when it comes to his mother's loutish and lazy fiance, who rouses himself from the couch only to issue orders to Rafe or raid the fridge. His mom Jules is great, but she's working two shifts at the diner since her boyfriend Bear moved in just to keep the family afloat, leaving Rafe mostly under Bear's thumb.

And as Rafe stumbles into his homeroom and tries to take his first seat for the first day of middle school, he runs afoul of the class bully, Miller the Killer:

"You're in my seat," said Miller.

"I don't see your name on it," I told him, and I was just starting to think maybe that was the worst thing to say, when Miller put out one his XXXL paws around my neck and starting lifting me like a 100-pound dumbbell. "Let's try that again," he said. "This is my seat. Understand?"

"SIT DOWN, NOW!" bellowed Mr. Rourke.

Since nobody else was stupid enough to sit right in front of Miller, that was the only seat left.

And because I'm the world's biggest idiot, I didn't look back when I went to sit in my chair. That's why I hit the dirt as I went down--all the way down--to the floor.

The good news? Given the way things had started off, I figured middle school could only get better from here.

The bad news? I was wrong about the good news.

The usual middle school stock characters are in attendance here--Dragon Lady Donatello for English, Principal Dwight with his 93 pages of school rules, Coach Lattimore, an apparent undergrad sadism major, the hair-netted lunchroom ladies with endless supplies of toxic meatloaf, and, to break the monotony of pain and boredom, the pretty and popular Jeanne Galleta, who occasionally gives our hero a smile.

But Leo the Silent has a plan: as Principal Dwight drones on at assembly, plowing through the HVMS Code of Conduct, Leo sketches out a way to make the misery fun--a challenge even. Can Rafe break every school rule and rack up a million points before the school year ends? Rafe hesitates, but then takes the Operation R.A.F.E. challenge. His first mission: set off the fire alarm in the middle of the reading of the rules. Rafe wheedles his way to a bathroom pass, doing his best whiny potential pants-wetter voice, and races to the nearest fire alarm box. Chaos! Success! 50,000 points already. And it's only the first day!

And the game is on. Rafe progresses from simple chewing-gum-in-class infractions, finally earning major points with a three-day suspension for burning his first failing report card. His sixth-grade year is going splendidly, game-wise, that is. And then his pranks hit the wall. He breaks his own rule, No One Gets Hurt, and inadvertently gets Jeanne sent to detention too.

Then disaster strikes. Miller the Killer seizes his notebook with the Operation R.A.F.E. scoring system and Leo's cartoons, and threatens to blow his cover unless Rafe pays him an ever-increasing price scale for each page. Rafe is forced to purloin soft drinks from Bear's hidden cache in the basement and set up a contraband trade out of his locker to make the payments. The game spins out of control, and Rafe becomes more and more desperate.

And then it gets worse! Jeanne points out that the consequences for Operation R.A.F.E. and the ensuing failing grades are going to qualify him for the booby prize--summer school--or even worse--repeating the whole sixth grade fiasco again next year! Help!

James Patterson's just published Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life (Little, Brown, 2011) uses the same devices--first person narration and kid-style cartoon illustration--as Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid series, and gives us the story of a kid with two strikes against him who nevertheless takes a futile swing at the one that is high and outside. But despite Rafe's eleven-year-old take on his first year at middle school, there are some adults who know how to offer him what he needs to break the loser mold. Dragon Lady Donatello is actually on his side, and working with his mother, who finally boots the Bear, finds a way for Rafe to get another chance at hitting it out of the park.

This is a highly-readable, very funny best seller which nonetheless slips in a lot of insight into the middle school mind. Middle readers can always do with a bit of self-understanding, and Patterson's and co-author Chris Tebbetts' dose of this rare quality goes down easy here, coupled as it is with Laura Park's cartoon illustrations which mix sixth-grade reality and fantasy well. As Susan Carpenter, reviewer for The Los Angeles Times, puts it,"Middle School" does a wonderful job of channeling the anxiety, and (il)logic, of the middle-grade mind. "Middle School" is a perfectly pitched novel exploring an important and under-covered topic: the unhealthy ways in which disempowered kids express themselves to obtain some sort of control over situations in which they find themselves helpless."

Stink Far Out: Stink: Solar System Superhero by Megan McDonald

Flub! Flop! Flunk!

Stink Moody had to take a test.

A SCIENCE TEST. A SOLAR SYSTEM test! He had to learn all the planets--by tomorrow!

Stink went to find his big sister. He sure hoped Judy wasn't in a mood.

If Judy was in a mood, Stink hoped it was a help-you-little-brother-study-for-his-test mood.

No sweat for Stink. Judy gives him the keyword: PIZZA! "My Very Eccentric Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas," she explains. Each word begins with the first letter of the planets in order outward from the sun, from Mercury to Pluto. "It's a mnemonic device," Dad adds. Stink knows he's going to ace that test!

But when he gets his test paper back, there's a big red X right next to Pluto, while his know-it-all classmate Riley Rottenberger smirks "It's a dwarf planet. Everybody know Pluto isn't a planet anymore," she insists, pointing to her Space Camp t-shirt which says "PLUTO IS DEAD."

To head off a free-for-all argument over the status of Pluto, Stink's teacher takes a vote to see how many classmates are Pluto fans. When a sizable number raise their hands, she wisely declares that there will be a presentation by both camps. Riley, of course, heads the the KPBs (Kick Plutos (er) Behind) team and Stink leads Captain Pluto and the Underdogs. Stink researches the criteria for planetdom and with his "Make Your Own Bumper Sticker" kit, prints out a bunch of magnetic "Honk If You Love Pluto" signs, even affixing one to his teacher's little blue Mini's bumper. Stink's presentation carries the vote, and even Riley admits to feeling a little sorry for poor Pluto, kicked out of his group.

"Any friend of Pluto's is a friend of mine!" Stink says.

There's no better way to introduce a primary science unit on the solar system than with a reading of Megan McDonald's newest addition to the Stink Moody series, Stink: Solar System Superhero (Book #5) (Candlewick, 2010). Younger brother Stink is the perfect foil to moody Judy, ever ebullient and ready to throw himself into any venture headlong, even if it takes him to the darkest reaches of outer space where the dwarf planets dwell. Peter Reynolds' clever line drawings are virtually inseparable from this wonderful series of beginning chapter fiction, and this Stink story is far-out fun.

A Thing with Feathers: Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt

So my father came home with his lunch pail in his hand and a bandage on his face and the last check he would ever see from Culross Lumber, and he looked at my mother and said, "Don't you say a thing." Mom jumped up from the table and brought over the plate she'd been keeping warm in the oven.

"It's not all dried out, is it?" he said.

"I don't think so,' Mom said.

"You don't think so," he said, and reached for the ketchup. He smeared it all over his meat loaf. Took a red bite. "We're moving," he said. "To Maysville. Upstate." Another red bite. Ballard Paper Mill has a job and Ernie Eco says he can get me in."

Ernie Eco," said my mother quietly.

"So it will begin all over again. The bars, gone all night, coming home when you're--"

"Which one of your sons will it be this time?" my mother said.

My father looked at me.

In Doug Swietock's own words, his father is a jerk, his oldest brother, somewhere in Vietnam, is an unwelcome subject, his older brother Chris, who steals his only joy, his autographed Joe Pepitone cap, is a jerk, and, as he ruefully admits to himself, he's well on his way to becoming one himself. Stuck in a tiny bedroom with his abusive brother in a house he names "The Dump," "stupid Maysville" has no promise for Doug, and his defensive attitude gets him in hot water at school right away.

But Maysville has its own promise, in the form of an understanding librarian who shows him the town's chief claim to fame, a first edition of Audubon's Birds of America. Doug is arrested by the plate on view, the Arctic Tern, and he feels a sudden connection to the bird and an unexpected urge to draw it himself, which Mr. Powell encourages. A chance meeting with a girl, Lil Spicer, brings a deepening friendship and a job as Saturday delivery boy for Spicer's Deli.

As Doug experiences developing relationships with the customers he sees each Saturday, his confidence grows, helping him to accept the encouragement of teachers at Maysville Junior High, where he overcomes his reading problem and discovers his abilities in math and science. Despite the open cruelty of his father, who has his chest tattooed with "Mama's Baby" for backing up his abused mother, Doug begins to see that there are better things ahead for him than following his father's path.

In Maysville there are a rush of personalities and experiences--the class study of Jane Eyre, Mrs. Windemere, the crusty old playwright who is turning the novel into a stage play and shares her weekly carton of ice cream with him, Mr. Ballard, the town's chief employer and beneficent dictator, whose summer picnic baseball trivia quiz Doug wins and who makes him a sort of protege, Mr. Powell, who introduces him to the meaning as well as the composition of art, even the coming Apollo moon landing which, with Audubon's birds, becomes the novel's central symbol.

Newbery author Gary Schmidt (for his companion book The Wednesday Wars) almost overloads this novel with the events and characters which together move Doug Swietock from proto-loser to winner, some of them bordering on the improbable, but which Schmidt ties together so compellingly that they seem improbably inevitable. Character and setting are so interwoven that the overlapping strands of plot build to a conclusion which leaves Doug Swietock grounded in a hard reality but one still with room for hope, okay for now.

A moving story which is hard to put down and harder to forget. Gary Schmidt's Okay for Now (Clarion, 2011) is forthcoming April 5.

Appomattox Revisited: The Cruisers by Walter Dean Myers

We believe that it is our sacred duty to our brothers of African descent to continue teaching them our ways, including our religion, our principles, and our civilization.

We believe we owe it to these visitors to our shore to continue bringing them along, civilizing them as we give them opportunities for honest labor and the fruits of our fair country. To this and this alone, we owe it to ourselves to break the treaty with the Northern states and to do our duty as Southerners.
--Alvin McCraney and the Sons of the Confederacy

When Mrs. Maxwell, principal of Harlem's Da Vinci Academy for the Gifted and Talented, divides the eighth grade into Union and Confederate sides for their unit on the Civil War, she's looking for a creative way to motivate her students to get into the weeds of that epic struggle. Instead it looks as if she's scripted Civil War Two, the Sequel.

Cocky jock Alvin McCraney, always considered something of a closet racist, feels himself enabled to put his beliefs in a flimsily disguised article in the school newspaper, The Palette. Most of the students outside Alvin's circle are uncomfortable with his stance, and some are about ready to rumble. Alvin claims First Amendment rights and, anyway, he says, he's just role-playing in the spirit of their history assignment. And Vice-Principal Culpepper backs him up.

But the canny Mrs. Maxwell sees an double opening here. Zander Scott and his friends, staff of the school's alternative publication, The Cruiser, are in both editorial and academic hot water, and she offers the group a chance to redeem themselves--if they can find a way to mediate both the McCraney matter and the mock Civil War itself.

The Cruisers may not be the most dedicated of academic stars, but they have plenty of smarts and talent on their side, and Zander manages to come up with a plan of passive resistance to McCraney's white supremacists that averts all-out war at Da Vinci and in their Civil War unit as well--and wins for his friends and himself a good chance at graduating from the Academy.

Score one for non-violence and for the adroit award-winning Walter Dean Myers, who negotiates the urban school scene with insight, empathy, and intelligence. His latest, Cruisers Book 1 (Scholastic, 2010) is an impressive beginning to what is intended to be a series involving this engaging group of gifted eighth graders.

Poor Richard Rides Again: Big Nate Strikes Again by Lincoln Peirce

THINGS I CAN'T STAND
by Nate Wright, Esq.

Egg salad
School picture day
Bubble gum that loses its flavor in 20 seconds
Any art project involving egg cartons or pipe
cleaners
GINA

Big Nate is back, but he's not having his best week.

The good news? He's finally been named captain of the SPOFF (Sports Played Only For Fun) fleece ball team. The bad news? That show-off, know-it-all, perfect A+-only Gina is on his team. She can't hit, she can't catch, and she can't pitch--anything but sarcasm, that is, and her pitiful performance is the only thing that stands between Big Nate and the SPOFFY, the coveted soda-can-covered-with-crumpled-foil trophy for the championship.

The good news? He's assigned to do research on Benjamin Franklin, whom Nate finds to be a pretty cool dude. The bad news? His partner on this big-deal project is--Gina.

Nate actually hides out, er, does research on Big Ben in the library while dodging other duties. Nate is proud of his research product, BEN FRANKLIN COMIX, which the stodgy Gina rejects, pointing out the superiority of her thick desktop-published thesis, complete with web photos and copious facts about Franklin, Citizen and Founding Father.

Nate sees an opening here. He makes Gina an offer she can't refuse: she pretends she can't play on fleece ball days, and he "lets" her do the whole report all by herself, assuring that her record of perfect grades will remain intact. It's a win-win for our boy!

But best laid plans often go astray. First, Mrs. Godfrey, stickler for the rules of writing, detects, amazingly, a significant transgression in Gina's report:

Mrs. Godfrey starts flipping through it. Her smile slowly fades.

"Is--is something wrong?" Gina says. Her voice sounds a tiny bit higher than usual.
"Can you tell me about these visual aids?" Mrs. Godfrey asks.

Gina looks panicky. "I...um...printed some of them off the internet and I photocopied the others from library books."

Mrs. Godfrey frowns "The instructions were very clear." She reads them aloud.

"Visual aids are an important part of your project. You must create them yourself. Using images from outside sources could result in a failing grade."

At first Nate secretly smirks. How tragic for poor Gina. But then he remembers that as part of the team, her grade is also his grade. And he's already failing. Ooops!

In Lincoln Peirce's second cartoon classic, Big Nate Strikes Again (Harper, 2010) it's a win-win for both Gina and Big Nate, as Big Nate pulls this one out when he produces his Ben Franklin Comix, which knocks Mrs. Godfrey's socks off with its creative graphic exposition of the well-researched highlights of Poor Richard's career. Advantage: Nate. But then Gina comes off the bench to sub for the injured Nate and hits it out of the park in the championship final of the SPOFF playoff.

Score: Nate: 1; Gina: 1. And the rivalry continues.

As in his New York Times best-selling Big Nate: In a Class by Himself, Peirce hits a home run in Big Nate Strikes Again, with his hilarious spoof of middle school angst and his practiced cartoon exposition. Jeff Kinney, author of the wildly popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid, says, "Big Nate is funny, big time." He ought to know.

Peirce's just-out latest is Big Nate: From the Top.

School Express: Late for School by Steve Martin

"WOKE UP THIS MORNING...."

It's the classic opening line for a blues song, and this kid has got a right to sing the blues!

THE CLOCK SAID I WAS LATE FOR SCHOOL.

TEACHER TOLD ME THAT'S NOT COOL.

Our sleepy scholar yanks on his tee-shirt and shorts and dashes downstairs and out the back door, accidentally elbowing his granny right into her morning pie and Java. Too late for the bus, the kid takes all the known shortcuts, including logrolling on a float across his neighbor's pool:

JUMP ONTO A DIVING BOARD,
BOUNCING OFF IT AND HEADING TOWARD
A JUNGLE GYM, SWUNG JUST RIGHT,
AND CAUGHT ONTO A KITE.

WHOA! I'M FLYING UP SO HIGH!

Our kid makes the school and dashes through his classroom door just as the clock hits 8 A.M.--and, of course, there's no one there. It's Saturday. But you knew that!

Steve Martin's just published Late for School (Grand Central, 2010), based on one of the songs from his Grammy-winning album The Alphabet from A to Y (with Bonus Letter Z), suffers from transcription from catchy banjo song to text. Martin's scansion and rhyme scheme leave something to be desired, but his illustrator, C. F. Payne, more than makes up for this flaw by deftly capturing the rhythm and exuberance of Martin’s performance in his hilarious (and I mean really, really comic) cartoon portrayals of this earnest, jug-eared schoolboy who really, really tries to get to school on time. Payne's facial expressions and body language of our errant protagonist (and his blueberry-pie-faced granny) are priceless, raising this tale to the level of a must-have for the school stories shelf.

Which inspires me to versify. . .

But why...oh, why
Is Granny having pie
For breakfast?

Movin' On: Diary of A Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth by Jeff Kinney

Tuesday: When I got to school today, Rowley was waiting by my locker, and he had a huge smile on his face. Then I noticed he had a big pimple right in the middle of his forehead. Most people would have stayed home from school if they had a zit like that, but here's what Rowley said--"MY MOM SAYS I'M BECOMING A MAN!"

Later on, I saw Rowley hanging out near the older kids' lockers. So I guess he thinks just because he got a pimple, he's part of their club now or something.

And believe me, I'm not jealous. But this is a kid who still sleeps with a pile of stuffed animals every night, so it doesn't make any sense that he gets his first pimple before I got MINE.

Everybody's favorite middle schooler is moving on, if not necessarily up. Scrutinizing himself in the mirror for non-existent signs of puberty, Greg turns to Mom and Dad for comfort:

But they told me that when they were my age, they were WAY behind their classmates. Then Dad told me not to expect to get a lot of facial hair even when I'm an adult, because he's a grown man and he only shaves once or twice a week.

Well, that was some REALLY bad news. They're always saying you can grow up to be anything you want, but now I realize that that's not true.

Greg sadly marks off jobs he can never measure up to--pirate, lumberjack, magician, criminal--from his future career choices.

And there are other issues. Now that her children are older, she says, Mom decides to take some college courses and lets the men of the house know that they now own some new chores. When that doesn't exactly work out, Mom hires a maid, Isabella, who doesn't work period. But Mom refuses to fire her even when Greg finds her nylon socks in his bed where she has been napping daily.

Algebra is not going too well, either, but Greg hopes the "Lock-In" overnight party at the school will make up for having no best friend and bad math grades. But that night Greg comes to a major realization:

At one point George Fleer started chasing people around with his outie, which was pretty terrifying.

See, this is the kind of thing I can't stand about boys my age. When it comes down to it, they're just a bunch of wild animals.

Greg figures he's stuck in middle-school limbo, but then, just as he's forced to play assistant flower boy at Uncle Gary's fourth wedding, the family matriarch Gammie calls him in for the family rite de passage, "the Talk."

I was a little nervous, but I was also kind of excited. Gammie's been around the block about a million times, and I figured she's got a lot of wisdom stored up. And to be honest with you, these days I could really use some.

Jeff Kinney's fourth installment of his Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth (Amulet Books, 2010) is a bitter-sweet outing. Greg Kinney is just as funny as ever, but he's growing up a bit, too. As Gammie points out, his next few years are going to be good ones to avoid family photos that he'll regret later, but she also makes the case that getting old is no walk in the park either, and Greg figures out that maybe these last years as a kid are not so bad after all. Getting into the weeds of early adolescence just makes this series funnier, with laugh-out-loud situations that are right on target for kids going through their wonder years, and poignantly (and perhaps painfully) familiar for those who have left those years behind.

Clipped! Lawn Boy Returns by Gary Paulsen

"You're saying we actually need someone to manage the people who are working for us to manage the business?" I said.

"Crazy, isn't it?" said Arnold. "But just think--you're stimulating the economy by giving all these people jobs."

"But who's going to manage the people we hire to manage the people who manage the business?"

"Oh. Well....wait. That would be just silly."

"Good," I said.

It's only been a month, a month since Lawn Boy inherited his grandfather's trusty old riding mower and decided to earn a few bucks to fix up his bike so he could ride around goofing with his friends. Then he met Arnold, a down-on-his-luck accountant/investment counselor who offers to "manage" LB's money for a free mowing job, and the rest is financial history. Lawn Boy finds he has the knack for mowing, and when he has more jobs than he can cover, Arnold offers his also unemployed buddy Pasqual to lend a hand. Before he knows it, LB has employees and a schedule, and Arnold is investing his surplus cash in risky ventures which just happen to turn over triple digit returns. Arnold talks him into taking over the management of the punchy but promising boxer Joey Pow and Pow turns a neat profit, too. From a broke twelve-year-old kid, Lawn Boy is suddenly a mini-magnet, with $400,000 (and change) in the bank, and his family's financial worries are history, too.

Well, the summer winds on, and in the sequel to his best-selling Lawn Boy (Yearling, 2009) our hard-mowing hero is back with Lawn Boy Returns (Random, 2010) just in time for the this summer's growing season.

Picking up where he left off, we see Lawn Boy beginning to yearn for the simplicity of the old days when all he did was mow a few lawns, ruefully ruminating on the fact that he never did get time to buy that inner tube and ride his bike. He's now the titular head of a going concern. Arnold has expanded the company's services to include pool maintenance, garage cleaning, and landscaping, necessitating some new hires--an attorney, a tax accountant, a business manager, an administrative assistant/webmeister, and an office manager, (pretty surprising since the "office" is still Arnold's dining room and kitchen tables, that is until his negotiations on a corporate headquarters building are consummated.)

Then things get complicated. Joey Pow sorta "forgets" to throw a fight that the local crooks had, er, invested in heavily, and LB's grandma is the hostage of choice until the, um, "discussions" are complete. Zed, Joey Pow's a self-proclaimed second cousin by multiple marriage turns up and parks his rusty rig in LB's yard, inviting his beer-bellied buddies for a beer-and-wienie bash, and leans on LB for a cushy job with the family business. Suddenly, Lawn Boy learns that the company is being audited by the IRS and his parents are being sued for violation of child labor law. His all-American rags-to-riches story has made him a media darling, and there's a covey of cute girls encamped on his curb with autograph books.

Another promising start-up is threatened by overexuberant expansion.

Nothing sucks like success. It's time for the chairman of Lawn Boy, Inc., to take charge.

Gary Paulsen's short and snappy second book is just as drop-dead funny as the first and should be read as soon as the first book is finished. Lawn Boy is a likable, intrinsically cool character who rides it all out on the well-worn seat of his grandpa's mower, and when things seem overwhelming, he finds a note, taped to the bottom of the seat and neatly printed from his late Gramps:

"A ship is safe in the harbor, but that's not why ships are built."

Yep. Lawn Boy has truly tried the waters, and as the summer wanes, and after a much-needed layover in a quiet cove, he's ready to face school and is almost looking forward to the simplicity of trig. But of course, Arnold has big plans for adding winterizing and snow removal to the company's services and then ....

These two books, best-sellers in humorous tradition of Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid, are often touted as "reluctant reader" fodder. Newbery winner Paulsen is indeed the master of full-speed storytelling and straightforward but memorable prose, but for the middle school reader these two books have more than brevity going for them. His chapter titles--"The Origins of Economic Collapse," and "Crisis Management as a Form of Team Development"--point up his tongue-in-cheek but telling commentaries on the perils of entrepreneurship, with Lawn Boy's innate common sense in the mix to make sure it's smooth sailing ahead for Lawn Boy, Inc. It's a lot of laughs and a lesson in life in one fell swath of close-clipped lawn as Lawn Boy rides on.

You Never Know...: The Adventures of Benny by Steve Shreve

Benny woke up early one morning. He packed a baloney sandwich, a fresh pair of underpants and clean socks--because you never know when a pair of clean socks or underwear might come in handy.

He headed through the woods to the old fishin' hole.

And sure enough, extra undies are just what he needs. Following huge footprints through the trees, Benny comes across Bigfoot, yelling in pain from a wood splinter in his caboose, which Benny, who seems to know his Aesop, gently removes, earning the creature's gratitude. Benny even offers his skivvies and socks to Bigfoot to prevent further splinter incursions and offers to share his sandwich.

They found a couple of logs (without splinters) and sat down to eat.

Benny looked over at Bigfoot.

"You don't have a nose," said Benny. "How do you smell?"

"Terrible," replied Bigfoot.

"I see," said Benny. "Well, that's a relief. I thought the baloney sandwich had gone bad."

On his way again, Benny is soon snatched by a wolf who plans to stew him up for dinner. Bigfoot happens by, and in proper Aesop fashion, rescues Benny, who loses his fishing gear in the process, but that is by no means the end of Benny's adventures.

A trip to Egypt with his archaeologist Uncle Howard brings an encounter with the somewhat unraveling mummy of King Butthankhamon, who resists a trip back to the museum. Luckily, Benny has brought along a extra roll of toilet paper against unforeseen expediences this time, and King Butt agrees to cooperate in exchange for a re-wrapping.

Then it's on to a tussle with the pirate Long John Underwear and a scary tangle with a giant squid before Benny in relief returns to the safety of his own bed. Unfortunately, underneath is the Booger Man, and when he finally gives that guy the shake, he finds himself contending with a troop of monkeys and a ghost for a buried treasure. Benny prevails at last, with just enough of the treasure trove to afford a new fishin' pole, which brings the tale around full circle to the old fishin' hole.

Somewhere between a beginning chapter book, picture book, and graphic novel, Steve Shreve's Adventures of Benny (Marshall Cavendish, 2009) is a genuinely funny quick read for reluctant readers, cleverly illustrated with blackline drawings by the author.

Making It in Middle School: Big Nate in a Class by Himself by Lincoln Peirce

Not that I'm an average sixth grader. Okay, I'll admit that I'm not exactly Joe Honor Roll, but answer me this: When I get out there in the real world, is anybody going to care whether or not I know who was vice president under Warren G. Harding? (And don't try to pretend that YOU know who it was, because you don't.)

The point is, I want to use my talents for more than just memorizing useless facts. I'm meant for bigger things. I am...

DESTINED FOR GREATNESS!

At first look, Nate Wright doesn't look like destiny's child. He's not dumb, but he is a devoted slacker in class, totally out of the running in any competition with his perfect big sister, Ellen, or his brainiac buddy Francis. He's not a talented charmer, like Artur, whose earnest broken English has the girls, especially Nate's secret love Jenny, falling all over him and the teachers wrapped around his artistic pinky. Nope, Nate's special talent is his ability, defying all external evidence, to believe that he is destined for great things.

So when friend Teddy gives him a fortune cookie which prophesies TODAY YOU WILL SURPASS ALL OTHERS, he just knows that today is the day he will achieve greatness before his awe-stricken classmates. But when attempts to slip his artwork into the hall display case on top of Artur's and an abortive love poem to Jenny in creative writing class go awry, Nate finds himself with two pink detention slips long before lunch! The rest of the day goes downhill from there, until at the final bell, Nate finds himself with a pile of pink slips, standing once more before the desk of Mrs. Czerwicki, dragon of the detention room.

"Nate," she asks, "just how many teachers wrote you up?"

"All of 'em," I say.... "And the principal."

Mrs. Czerwicki looks a little stunned. She spreads out the slips on her desk like she's playing solitaire. She shakes her head. "Nate... "You appear to have established a new record."

"Over the years, several students have received four detentions in a single day. A few have had five. One even got six. Until now...."

Wait. "Does that mean I've... SURPASSED ALL OTHERS?

Mrs. Czerwicki grimaces. "Well... I suppose you could put it that way."

The legions of fans who wait eagerly for the next book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series will find veteran cartoonist Lincoln Peirce's first venture into the book format for his famous comic hero, Big Nate: In a Class by Himself (Harper, 2010) just the sort of source of solid laughs which will find a place in their backpacks, along with a bag of Nate's favorite junk food, Cheez Doodles, as provender for surviving those perilous middle school years.

Too Cool for Middle School: Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Movie

"You'll be dead or home schooled by the end of the year!"

It's his first day of middle school, and big brother Rodrick just has to scare the living daylights out of Greg Heffley.

It's out, at long last, the movie based on Jeff Kenney's mega-best-selling Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which transforms a comic novel in, yes, comic form, into a live-action movie featuring plain old actors and actress, and actually does it rather well.

Many of the genuinely big laughs from the book make the transfer to live action seamlessly, reinforced by occasional combinations of Kinney's comic drawings and the live characters on screen together. Director Thor Freudenthal (Hotel for Dogs) consciously chose to omit or integrate many of Greg's humorous musings into a plotline--dealing with the shocks to the friendship of Greg and grade school friend Rowley Jefferson as they hit the social rough spots of middle school--on the way to the required happy fadeout which he tacks on to Kinney's book. Still, the ending, while not exactly there in the text, doesn't stray too far from the sense of the story.

The casting is inspired, with everyone from Rodrick to Fregley coming off exactly as author Kinney conceived them. Devon Bostick is a standout as big brother Rodrick, drummer of the self-important garage band Loded Diper, who plays the downright wicked prankster with apparent relish, for example, shaking poor Greg awake at 4 a.m. to tell him he's late for his first day at middle school. Robert Capron is spot on as the chubby and unconsciously uncool Rowley, Greg's best friend, and Grayson Russell virtually upstages everyone with his manic portrayal of neighborhood weird kid Fregley. Zach Gordon as Greg plays his straight-man role well, toeing the fine line between portraying his character as an insecure, but bravura six-grader and the self-serving jerk that Greg sometimes is.

There are plenty of laughs for audiences of all ages here. Kids who have read the books (and most of Kinney's fans have read each one multiple times) may lament the loss of favorite episodes and laugh lines and resent the film footage devoted to the necessities of structure that moviemaking demands. Kids who haven't read the books (if there are any of those left in North America) will love the film and probably head off to their nearest bookstore or library to pick up the books soon.

Kids who both like the books (four in the series so far) and the movie will enjoy reading about the making of the movie in The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary (Diary of a Wimpy Kid) (Amulet, 2010), describing the scripting, story-boarding, casting, and shooting of the movie itself. With so much great material in the remaining books to work with, it's likely there will be more on-screen sequels to this one down the line

Diary of A Wimpy Kid is rated PG and runs 93 minutes.

Stepping Back: Night Wings by Joseph Bruchac

To us time is not a straight line, and the past is never left behind. Instead, everything is a circle, and things keep happening again and again. Like the turn of the seasons or the movement of the earth around the great sun that makes day and night, day and night, in an endless circle.

I'm not talking about time travel like in one of those corny movies when someone goes back in a machine or a souped-up car.... I'm talking about stepping into a past that is always with us, a past that was then and is also now, where the flow and the balance remain unchanged.

With his parents both deployed to Iraq, thirteen-year-old Paul Fortune moves in with his Abenaki Indian grandfather, a retired guide for the wilderness area around Mt. Washington and famed for his knowledge of the forest and Native American lore. As Paul is settling into his new life, his grandfather Pete turns down the offer of a job by Darby Field, a sleezy television producer leading an expedition in search of the mystery of Pmola, the legendary bird-like monster said to guard a treasure atop Mt. Washington. Darby, a sort of Indiana Jones gone bad, produces and stars in a hyperbolic cable series which Grampa Pete intuits is merely a pretense to plunder cultural treasures wherever he can.

Undeterred by Grandpa's refusal, Darby and his stereotypical henchmen Stazi, Louise, and Tip capture Paul and Grandpa Pete and take them on a forced march through the wilderness toward the peak of Mt. Washington, where legend has it that Pmola hid his treasures. But when Paul notices that the usual air traffic over the area has mysteriously vanished and spots a small group of caribou, extinct in this region for centuries, he realizes that his grandfather is cunningly leading the kidnappers into a time warp which will eventually lead them to a face-to-face encounter with the legendary monster they seek to exploit.

A strangled cry comes from up the mountain. And although I probably shouldn't look back, I can't help myself. Field and Louise have fallen to the ground and are looking up at the tall dark figure above them, its wide black wings spread, blotting out the setting sun.

Paul, too, is touched by the encounter with the giant and deadly Pmola in a coming-of-age adventure that will keep middle readers enthralled as this high altitude adventure unfolds. Bruchac, the skillful author of other perennially popular Native American monster cliffhangers such as Skeleton Man, Whisper in the Dark, and The Dark Pond, knows how to fashion a taut, page-turning suspense novel which nevertheless imparts knowledge and wisdom to its target audience along the way, and his latest, Night Wings (HarperCollins, 2009) is no exception.

As Booklist's reviewer puts it, "Bruchac's fast-moving tale is steeped in Indian lore that injects this otherwise straightforward thriller with a sense of meaning and even spirituality. A perfect book to gobble up in a single, sweaty sitting."

And for a sample of the prolific Bruchac's excellent historical fiction, young adult readers should not miss his terrific Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two, reviewed here.

Christmas Wishes? The Christmas Genie by Dan Gutman

You're probably not going to believe this story.

Fine. That's okay. It's a free country.

But I know what happened, because I was there. Where's there? Lincoln School in Oak Park, Illinois. Fifth grade.

It happened just before winter vacation, on December 21. That's the winter solstice....

Foreshadowing!! English folklorists know that it is on the shortest, darkest day of the year, when the unseen world is closest, that strange things can happen. It was on that midwinter eve when, in Susan Cooper's Newbery-winning The Dark Is Rising (The Dark Is Rising Sequence), Will Stanton's walk in the new-fallen snow takes him back in time to fight the renewed rising of the forces of darkness.

Dan Gutman's latest, The Christmas Genie, doesn't involve cosmic battles with good and evil, but a presentiment of a squat, wise-cracking spirit which emerges from a meteorite which falls, auspiciously, right through Chase's desk, interrupting Mrs. Walters' science lesson, which appropriately enough is on meteors. For a thirteen million light-years old genie, "Bob" is amazingly with it, dressed in flip flops and a tie-dyed tee and spouting the latest put-downs.

"You speak English?"

"Any dope can speak English," the genie said. "It's Japanese that's tricky."

"You ARE a genie, aren't you?" I said.

"Well, I ain't Santa Claus, that's for sure."

The disgruntled gremlin does make a deal with the amazed class--he'll grant one wish in return for their silence about his sudden appearance, with the caveat that they must come up with it within the hour or Bob will cancel their winter break. Mrs. Walters, ever vigilant for a teaching opportunity, springs into action, handing out 3 x 5 cards and instructing each student to submit one wish for class consideration. That woman can make an assignment out of anything, Chase grumbles to himself.

"Oh, one more thing." Bob said, "Remember the old saying--'Be careful what you wish for.'"

Borrowing from folklore, Gutman slyly makes that theme real for the fifth graders. Chase's wish for "all the money in the world" is shot down quickly by the class pragmatist who points out that if no one else had any capital, there would be no products to buy with his money. Other wishes prove equally problematic: kids get the vote? But they'd probably elect Miley Cyrus president, one realist says. Room-sized flat-screen TVs for everyone? Some people don't even have electricity or houses with walls to put them on, another points out. Every day is your birthday? You'd be dead in three months! The clock clicks inexorably forward as the stack of wish cards shrinks, with no agreement among the kids.

Will Mrs. Walters' class wind up with no wish and no winter vacation either?

Gutman, a best-selling author praised for his ability to draw reluctant male readers under his free-wheeling, humorous spell as shown in his earlier Nightmare at the Book Fair, and his prolific My Weird School Daze series (found here: and his historical sports fantasy series, Baseball Card Adventures (see here), manages to come up with more than just a goofy Christmas story. Gutman's books are known to be potent boy bait, while, as in the case of The Christmas Genie, artfully slipping in some thought-provoking themes among the hilarious and inventive plot lines. As one reviewer put it, "Gutman packs plenty of history, science, and ethics lessons in this fun, well-paced fantasy that happens to take place at Christmas, but will be enjoyed at any time of year. This book is laugh-out-loud funny from page one."

From the Heart: A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck

You could see from here the house was haunted. It hadn't had a lick of paint since VJ Day, maybe the war before that. Only the snowball bushes crowding its foundations seemed to hold the place up.

At night lights moved from room to room. Every evening just at dusk a light bobbed down the walk to the cobhouse and the privy behind and back again.

My little sister Ruth Ann couldn't take her eyes off the place.

"It's like Halloween here in August. I betcha there are spooks inside that house."

And for twelve-year-old Bob that privy becomes his own private house of horrors. Scooped up by the village bullies, led by the massive Roscoe Burdick, they "initiate" him to life in Piatt County, Illinois, by trussing him up and playing water polo with him in the funky brown waters of the local pond and then hanging him, upside down and naked, in a web of fishing line inside that privy, to be eventually found and rescued by the equally frightening Mrs. Dowdel, the nearly ninety-year-old resident of the "haunted house." Mrs. Dowdell wastes no time sizing the situation up:

"I thought I'd seen everything!" she remarked. I made a small sound.

She dumped her corncobs and the Farm Journal and ripped the duct tape off my mouth.

"Yeoww!" I hollered.

"Had to be done," she said. "Who did you say you was?"

I coughed up something--maybe a tadpole. "I'm Bob Barnhart. The boy next door."

"Well, I can see you ain't the girl," said Mrs. Dowdel.

Bob is not the only one in the family for whom prospects look dim in their new home. "I take back every bad thing I ever thought about Terre Haute," Bob's mom laments as she sizes up the situation, and his dad, serving his first pastorate in the dilapidated and almost memberless Methodist Church, spends his first days ministering to the dirty and windowless sanctuary, killing a hog snake and no end of spiders in the choir loft and tacking up plastic over the broken windows. Bob's fifteen-year-old sister Phyllis takes refuge in the daily letters she writes to Elvis and sums up the secret feelings of the family. "I hate this podunk town!"

A most unlikely Christmas angel, Mrs. Dowdel, irascible and short-tempered, proudly proclaiming that she's not a church woman and she doesn't neighbor, nevertheless takes the forlorn family's fortunes into her own large and capable hands. No one knows the ins and outs of the town better than she does, and as the summer turns into autumn, Mrs. Dowdel works her own kind of miracle on every member of the family. Oh, it takes the Halloween appearance of a fake Kickapoo Princess' ghost, the comeuppance of Roscoe Burdick and his accomplices which halts his draft-dodging ways and ends with a shotgun wedding to scheming high school queen Vaynetta Blalock, saving Phyllis from his scruffy attentions and getting at least one Burdick out of town. By book's end, Bob's mother has a proper Methodist Christmas choir to lead, his dad has an overflowing sanctuary and new windows, courtesy of Mrs. Dowdel's jam sales at the triumphant funeral of the Kickapoo Princess led by Rev. Barnhart. And Bob Barnhart, having successfully steered their old car, "The Pickle," on a wild ride into the woods for Mrs. Dowdel's free Christmas tree, feels himself well on the way to manhood.

Richard Peck's newest, A Season of Gifts (Dial, 2009), brings back the memorable Grandma Dowdel of his Newbery books, A Long Way From Chicago (Puffin Modern Classics) and A Year Down Yonder, still feisty and masterful twenty years later, as she finds young people who need her to take their lives by the horns as she did for her grandchildren Joey and Mary Alice a generation earlier.

As Richard Peck shows us in those hilarious and heartwarming books, he excels at stories of the American heartland, set geographically as they are in the Midwest, but also set emotionally squarely in the heart, the place where children--and their elders--really live. As the critic at Kirkus Reviews puts it, "Pitch-perfect prose, laced with humor and poignancy, strong characterization and a clear development of the theme of the gifts one person can offer make this one of Peck's best novels yet-and that's saying something."