Choices: Tight by Torrey Maldonado

I have questions I should ask. Why you look so relaxed hopping that turnstile? What do you think would've happened if cops caught us?

But I don't ask. Those questions might make me look soft. Our train pulls out.

What we just did was crazy. And fun.

Bryan usually spends his after-school hours at his mom's office in the Community Center, doing homework and drawing superheroes, and when his mother suggests that he hang out with one of her clients, Mike, Bryan is uncomfortable. Mom says Mike is polite and makes good grades, but something about Mike seems edgy to Bryan. But his drawings of Flash and Black Panther are great, and soon Bryan and Mike are hanging out playing video games and calling each other "brother."

But things start to go south when Mike begins to dare him to do things he doesn't want to do--throwing rocks at cars from the roof of their building, forging a note from his mother so they can skip school, ducking the turnstile at the subway station, and "train surfing," hanging on to the back of a train for thrills. But when Bryan protests, Mike calls him "soft" and "Mama's Boy," but after they get a younger boy caught sneaking under the turnstile, Bryan sees that things are heading in a dangerous direction. But when Mike taunts him in front of his classmates, Bryan explodes in rage and beats Mike up. Suddenly Bryan realizes that this behavior is what keeps his own father in and out of jail.

I feel alone in all this craziness. Craziness I let myself get into for months. I feel like I can't talk to anyone. I hate it.

Bryan turns to his mom.

"You have choices," she says. "You can choose different reactions. You can choose different friends and different ideas of fun."

Widening choices and at-odds loyalties make early adolescence a hard time to navigate, and Torrey Maldonado's newest, Tight (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2018), is a novel which offers a realistic view of the pressures from peers and parents and offers some ways to sort out the choices for dealing with them, thanks to a family that is working them out with him. A serious read for boys moving into the wider world and looking for values that work. Adds Kirkus, "Readers will be rooting for Bryan to make the right choices even as they understand the wrong ones."

Rafe Scores! Middle School: Just My Rotten Luck by James Patterson and Chris Tebbetts

Finding a dollar on the ground is special. But getting into a "special needs" program with "special" classes and no guarantee of getting through middle school anytime especially soon?

What did all of this mean, exactly? Was I just plain dumb? Could I have gotten out of it if I'd paid more attention in school? If I didn't have an imaginary friend who I used to talk to all the time?

If I wasn't so weird?

Rafe is back where he started, at Hill Valley Middle School, the scene of the crime, so to speak, where he succeeded in breaking all the official 100 School Rules and managed to get himself expelled and subsequently suspended at not one, but two, private art schools. Now, after a sentence from the Hills Valley School Board to a summer at a boot camp for troublesome kids which had him hanging from rocky crags and swimming icy rivers, Rafe is permitted to enroll again at Hill Valley Middle. And he soon discovers that his sixth-grade nemesis "Miller the Killer," who subjected him to daily "swirlie" shampoos in the boy's bathroom, is still there, two-times bigger and three times meaner, and promising to beat him up anytime he can catch him alone.

And it gets worse.

Rafe is now placed in a "special needs" class, held daily in the "fish bowl," a conference room with wide windows allowing anyone in the HVMS Library to observe the SPED kids in Mr. Fanucci's class. But Rafe makes his first real (i.e., visible) friend, Flip, an otherwise genial ADHD kid who is also a jock, quarterback of the HV flag football team. And when he leaves Miller the Killer in the dust in a chase through the middle schools' halls, the winded but impresssed Miller makes Rafe an offer he can't refuse--make the team as a fleet-footed wide receiver and Miller will refrain from takedowns for the year. Flip amiably agrees to get Rafe up to speed, so to speak, on football skills, and he discovers that if Miller the Killer and his fellow linemen can clear him a space through their opponents' defense, Rafe can SCORE!

With HVMS on a winning streak, Rafe suddenly finds that status as football hero not only earns him a place at the popular jocks' lunch table, but also gets him some surprising attention from cute girls--all but his crush, Jeanne Galleto, who seems always to be on concession bar duty when he speeds to one of his big touchdowns. Still, there's hope there, and Rafe seems to have broken his bad luck streak.

But for some reason his life seems to be missing something in the excitement department. He has a private talk with his imaginary muse, Leo the Silent.

"Don't do anything," Leo says.

In case you haven't noticed, you're not getting into trouble. You're not breaking any rules--or even trying.  You're just playing football, drawing your comics, hanging out, and going to school. That's called normal, dude. Relax."

But then Rafe comes up with a way to follow his mentor Mrs. Donatello's advice to use his art talents to "make a difference." He creates a secret identity, S.A.M. (Sam the Art Man) and starts early morning postings around the school of parodies of art classics which satirize the school bullies. Rafe's clever cartooning skills soon become a local media sensation. Rafe feels like he's doing clandestine community service, but when his cover is blown, he discovers he's been breaking an obscure privacy law, and, just his luck, he's in back in Principal Striker's office hot seat again, in James Patterson's and Chris Tebbetts' latest in their best-selling series, Middle School series, Middle School: Just My Rotten Luck(Little, Brown and Company, 2015). Patterson and Tebbetts' formula for drop-dead-funny middle school stories is still scoring with reviewers and readers, and with an older-and-wiser, semi-successful Rafe, this one is truly up to speed with their other best-selling titles in the laughs department.

Read reviews of the whole series here.

Brainteaser: The Potato Chip Puzzle by Eric Berlin

The principal's office was down a short hallway, ending in a door you never wanted to open. Winston had never had a reason to knock on this door, and that was fine with him. He was still trying to figure out some way he might be in trouble. He took a keep breath and knocked softly. "Come in," said a brusque voice. Winston creaked the door open.

Principal Unger was not behind his desk. He was up and pacing. "Ah, Winston. Good. You're still the puzzle person, right? I want you to take a look at this. Here!" Mr. Unger thrust a paper into Winston's hands.

This was not at all what he had expected from a visit to the principal's office. "What is this?" asked Winston.

"I was hoping you could tell me."

Before him Winston Breen sees what is obviously an alphanumeric code of some sort, C3, J5, S2...., as his principal waits impatiently. Can Winston crack this code? And if he does, what does it mean for Principal Unger, Walter Fredericks Jr. High, and its most famous puzzle fan?

Winston Breen, hero of Eric Berlin's first book in this series, The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, again finds himself and his friends Mal and Jake involved in a cerebral mystery. Winston does unlock the code, revealing a local phone number, and when Mr. Unger calls, he learns that by solving the first test, his school has qualified to compete in a day of competitive puzzling sponsored by the eccentric millionaire entrepreneur, inventor of the square potato chip, who is offering a $50,000 prize to the winning team from those local middle schools who qualify by puzzling out the mysterious invitation. Only a handful of schools qualify, and when the day of the contest arrives, Winston finds himself for the first time among his puzzler peers, particularly the over-zealous Brendan Root, who falls all over himself to meet his idol, Winston, whose puzzle expertise in locating a local treasure trove has made him famous in his town.

But extricating himself from the lugubrious Brendan is only the beginning of Winston's problems. Not only is their chaperon, the controlling math teacher Mr. Garvey, consumed with his need to best a rival math teacher whose whizkid teams consistently smash Walter Frederick's math competitors, but the other teams are obviously filled with puzzle wizards and coaches who are equally determined to win by almost any means.

Then things turn take a turn for the worst. Mr. Garvey's car has a flat tire as they set for for the Planetarium to solve their first test, and it turns out that a glass-shard filled bottle was wedged behind their tire to make sure that their team would fall behind the others. Then other teams run into similar tricks: signs are reversed and a critical door locked to slow down another team; one team has a member locked in a bathroom, a handheld device with which each team reports the solution to each puzzle is stolen, at an amusement park the Ferris wheel with the puzzle clues aboard is locked in motion so that members of several teams are stuck aboard until another key can be found, and when Mal pursues a fleeing figure at the scene, he is injured in the scuffle which results in a black eye but in his grabbing a bag with incriminating evidence when the malefactor escapes.

It is obvious that one team is definitely guilty of malice aforethought in its determination to win the contest. Now Winston has two problems to solve: how to help his team complete the list of puzzles first and how to find out and foil the cheaters along the way.

Puzzle/mystery aficionados will find this second in the Winston Breen series, The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2009) just as exciting and even a bit more menacing than its predecessor. Fans of the riddle-based books in Trenton Stewart's best-selling The Mysterious Benedict Society or The 39 Clues, a popular ongoing series each sequel of which is intriguingly written by a different famous author, or Pseudonymous Bosch's quirky Secret Series which includes cryptic best-selling titles such as The Name of this Book Is Secret (Secret Series),If You're Reading This, It's Too Late (Secret Series), and This Book Is Not Good For You (Secret Series) will surely find the brainy and likable Winston Breen their man.

In addition to the puzzles embedded in the plot of The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, which readers can solve along with the characters, the solutions to these and many more puzzles are contained in the back matter, and if those aren't enough to keep fans going through the long winter nights ahead, there is a companion website with plenty more here to keep the puzzle addict satisfied.

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.