Back to School: School's First Day At School by Adam Rex

That summer they dug up the big field and poured the foundation and sat brick on to of brick until they'd built a school.

A sign above the door read FREDERICK DOUGLASS ELEMENTARY. That's a good name for me, thought the school.

But a new school is like a first-time student. Unschooled. Clueless.

A nice man named Janitor comes every day throughout the summer to paint and polish up the inside, and sometimes Janitor tries to tell School about what is about to happen, but School can't help being nervous about that first day.

Who knew a school has first-day fears, too?

In fresh paint and varnish, School is all dressed up for opening day, just like his students. But all does not go perfectly. School experiences an unexpected fire drill, and the students who have just settled in their new desks have to hustle out and stand on the playground. And as they file back in, School hears some conversations that give him a sick feeling way down in his basement.

Some older students gathered by the back fence and showed their bored faces.

"This place stinks," said one.

School sagged a little.

"I don't like school," says one kid.

Maybe it doesn't like you either, thinks School.

But soon the students are all settling down with their teachers, and Janitor gets to take a much-needed break.

School tunes in to what is going on down in the Kindergarten, where Aiden, Max, Bella, Emma, and Chloe sit together on the circle time rug and learn all about shapes. There's that quiet hum of a school where brains are busy learning new things, and a sense of peace settles over School. It's been a good day, all in all, with more to come, and School knows he's in the right place after all.

Adam Rex's latest, School's First Day of School (Roaring Brook Press, 2016), is a different sort of first-day story, seen from the point of view of a brand-new school, a newbie who, like the students, doesn't quite know what to going to happen. Kids will chuckle at the usual events, a sudden fruit-basket-turnover as an unexpected fire drill sends everyone back outside, one boy giggles so hard that he squirts milk all over School's pristine and polished lunchroom floor. (I'm covered with nose milk, thinks School), and drawings get thumb-tacked to his perfectly painted walls (Ouch!). Building on Rex's polished storytelling, Caldecott-winning artist, (for Last Stop on Market Street) Christian Robinson, adds tidy American primitive collage and acrylic illustrations with wide-angle and up-close looks at the first day of school and--of School himself.

Young students will never look at their schools in quite the same way again. An essential purchase for back-to-school reading. As Publishers Weekly puts it, "Every so often, a book comes along with a premise so perfect, it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been done before; this is one of those books."

Back to School: The Night Before First Grade by Natasha Wing

'Twas the night before first grade.
I kissed my dog Clover.
"School's starting tomorrow
Because summer's over."

To the merry meter and rhyme scheme of 'Twas the Night before Christmas, rising first-grader Penny works out all the opening day jitters as she and her best friend Jenny head off to school, excited about seeing their old Kindergarten teacher and friends and nervous about their new teacher and classroom. The two glory in being bigger and more with-it than the timid little Kindergartners as they make their way to their own classroom without a hitch.

Then, oh, no! A new class has to be formed and Penny and Jenny wind up in different classrooms!

We waved good-bye sadly
And said, "See you later."
I had to be brave
Because I'm a first grader.

First grade is not looking so great until Penny makes friends with Nina, an interesting girl with unusual glasses and a nice smile, a new girl who has never attended Penny's school. The two hit it off and Penny proudly shows her the ropes in the cafeteria at lunch.

While Penny and the new girl are sitting down together, Jenny comes in with her class, and, amazingly, she's leading a new girl who looks just like Nina! In fact, they're twins, and Penny and Jenny and Nina and Tina are looking forward to amazing times together in first grade.

The Night Before First Grade and its companion book The Night Before Kindergarten provide an opportunity for kids feeling first-day butterflies to get a bit of vicarious experience with fictional kids in the same boat. The books also offer a chance for parents and teachers to talk to kids about their fears and offer coping strategies for that big transition.

Natasha Wing's text hits all the worry points of the first day of school, while the familiar rhythm of The Night Before Christmas goes down like the proverbial spoonful of sugar.

Back to School? Second Grade Holdout by Audrey Vernick

I was a lot of things in first grade.

Star of the Day.

Unable to sit still (according to Ms. Morgan).

In the same class as my best friend, Tyler.

Tyler and I were pretty much kings of the twisty slide.

But things are not looking so good for second grade. His dad lays down the law about his priorities.

"Your job is to be a good student!" Dad says.

Then our rising second grader finds out that his friend Tyler is assigned to Mrs. Herman's class, while he has Mr. Glazer. It's time for Plan A. He figures he can kinda sneak into Mrs. Herman's class on the first day, incognito. His parents proclaim firmly that's never going to happen. He's underwhelmed with Mom's promise of the excitement of the second-grade field trip to the town jail.

Okay, it's time for Plan B.

Maybe he'll just stay in first grade. First grade has a lot going for it. Ms. Morgan understands him. He'll be, like, Lakeview School's most brilliant first grader ever! And on the zoo trip, he's sure to win the scavenger hunt prize! But, nope! Mom refuses to sign off on Plan B, too.

Second grade sounds like a lot of work. Tyler's two big sisters enthusiastically spell it out in discouraging detail. Sabrina describes the curriculum.

"You have to spell words like rendezvous and platypus. You have to speak Russian by Thanksgiving.

You have to learn the presidents by heart. Forward AND backward. Or you fail."

Tyler's sisters have more bad news. Mr. Glazer loves basketball but Ms. Herman hates it. The boys counter with the consolation that at least they can play ball together at recess.

And then comes the killer. Jacqueline drops the big bomb.

"Mrs Herman doesn't allow recess!" she says.

Hey!Wait! Have Tyler's sisters finally managed to exceed credulity, going one tall tale over the line?

The kings of the twisty slide cannot be tricked!

After all, first grade graduates weren't born yesterday, in Audrey Vernick's latest, Second Grade Holdout (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2017). Author Vernick dramatically paces her page turns perfectly in this second book about the perils of the primary grades, and artist Matthew Cordell frames his skillfully crafted cartoon illustrations in spot-art style, center page, with a mastery of facial expression and body language that pretty much tells the story to perfection in tandem with Vernick's text. Share this one with their 2015 hit for the back-to-school set, First Grade Dropout (see review here.) for a first choice for the first day of school!

A Most Fearsome Oath: Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers School: We the Children by Andrew Clements

Mr. Keane grabbed hold and pressed something into his palm, quickly closing the boy's fingers around it. Then he clamped Ben's fist inside his leathery grip.

"This thing in your hand? I've been carrying around with me every day for forty-three years . . . and before that, the other janitors had it--everyone of them--all the way back to the very first man hired by Captain Oakes himself when he founded the school."

"Look at it...but first promise that you'll keep all this secret." He squinted up into Ben's face, his blue eyes bright and feverish. "Do you swear?"

Ben's mouth was dry. He'd have done anything to get this scary old man with bad breath to let go of him. He whispered, "I swear."

It was a large gold coin with rounded edges, smooth as a beach pebble.

FIRST AND ALWAYS MY SCHOOL BELONGS TO THE CHILDREN. DEFEND IT. DUNCAN OAKES, 1783.

Ben is late for homeroom, running down a back hall in hopes of avoiding detention by making it into his seat before roll call, when he sees the school's elderly head janitor in obvious pain struggling down the hall. Ben tries to help, but instead of sending him for someone, the old janitor seems compelled to pass on some sort of secret talisman to him, something to do with the fate of the old building which has been the town school for more than 200 years.

Ben Pratt knows that his historic school is slated for the wrecking ball at the end of his sixth grade year. Although he loves the old school, given to the town by an eccentric and wealthy sea captain to be its school in perpetuity, Ben has other things on his mind as the school year draws to its close. Not just middle school next year and his parents' painful separation, which is with him like a familiar pain, but more immediately the big sailing race coming up on the weekend where he and rival Robert Gerritt will face off again in the individual heat.

But when the intercom breaks into their afternoon routine with the announcement that Mr. Keane has passed away, Ben suddenly feels the power of the old man's charge hit him full force. And then, there's the mystery of the meaning of this secret that he swore to uphold. How can he defend an old school that is already sold and set for demolition to provide land for a theme park, Tall Ships Ahoy! which the whole town believes will bring nothing but prosperity to Edgeport?

Ben turns to the smartest person he knows, his friend Jill. Together they read the inscription on the back of the gold coin, cryptic directions to someplace "amidships on the top deck, north-northeast." Immediately Jill remembers the compass rose outside the girls' bathroom on the third floor of the school. "The top deck, of course," Ben intuits, and behind a strangely short piece of molding on the wall they find a copper plate engraved and signed by three students in 1791. Hurriedly Jill and Ben walk to Ben's dad's boat to read the message in private:

If you have found this message on purpose, then an evil day besets us.... Captain Oakes has given this school to us, the children, but he feared others would one day try to take it away.

What follows are cryptic clues to the steps the "Keepers of the School" must follow to defend it from demolition. Ben hastily copies the message onto his laptop, and as the two walk down the pier toward home, they are stopped by Kevin at the marina security booth. "This is for your dad," he says, handing Ben a business card which reads JACKSON SWERDLING YACHT BROKER.

Ben is puzzled. His dad hasn't said anything about selling his beloved boat. Jill's suspicions are aroused, and when she questions Kevin about the appearance of the so-called broker, both realize that he must be the school's assistant janitor, Mr. Lyman--an apparent spy for someone. But why? Could Lyman have heard something from Mr. Keane, and knowing that Ben was the last one to talk to him, could he have actually bugged his dad's boat to find out what Ben knows about the mysterious gold coin and its strange charge? Suddenly Ben and Jill realize that they, willing or not, are now the Keepers of the School, and that it is their charge to stop the destruction of the centuries-old school and prevent the construction of the multi-million dollar theme park on its waterfront site. But how?

In this first of a planned series of six novels in the Keepers of the School series, We the Children (Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School) (Atheneum, 2010), best-selling author Andrew Clements lays the groundwork for what looks to be a page-turning mystery/ adventure series. No one knows how to get inside the heads of the upper elementary/middle school protagonist better than Clements, and this series looks to both familiar and new territory for this very capable author. In this first volume, Clements provides plenty of intriguing clues and irresistible hints, along with a daring rescue at sea to wind up the action, as We the Children (Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School) kicks off what promises to be a a page-turning new adventure series for middle readers.

Messin' With the Rhyme Scheme: Nothing Rhymes With Orange by Adam Rex

Sure, Orange has that one claim to fame. He's got an major fruit named after him. It is a bit of a distinction. After all, nobody calls a banana a "yellow."

But in the world of fruit, Orange has a hard gig. Being the color of highway warning signs and traffic cones doesn't build much of a fan base. And being practically un-rhymable, Orange is pretty much left out of the coveted end-of-line position in versification.

When there's a sunny fruit tale to be told,
Orange is left out alone in the cold.

HIT THE BEACH IN YOUR CABANA

WITH A PEACH OR A BANANA.

Hey! How much worse than that rhyme can it get? Orange is ready to audition for any line in this book. I mean, when this author stoops to rhyming cantaloupe with "antelope," how picky can he be? And anyway, a kid doesn't have to be dense not to know what a quince is!

And get a load of this seriously forced quatrain!

I THINK CHERRIES ARE THE BERRIES
AND LYCHEE IS JUST PEACHY.

THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA
IN A BOOK BY FREDRICH NIETZCHE

[SIGH!]

What's a cute fruit, nutrish and delish, got to do to get at least a walk-on line in this book?

At least author-illustrator Adam Rex gives the sadly neglected but colorful orange top billing in the title, in his latest, Nothing Rhymes with Orange (Chronicle Books, 2017). The author takes silliness seriously, and his artwork is no less playful, filled with fruity characters (and a bearded Fred Nietzche) with stick limbs and expressive faces that finish with a fruit bowl turn-over party. This is a great goofy book with comic characters for preschoolers, but for learned primary schoolers, the wry and sly wordplay with rhyme and rhythm is quite sophisticated, with a humorous nod to philosopher-savvy adults who get the good fortune to read this one aloud.

As a creator, Adam Rex has a genius for playing with the concepts of language and literature, as displayed in his spiffy spoof of the toddler bedtime classic Goodnight Moon in his parody classic Goodnight Goon: a Petrifying Parody, (see my 2008 review here.) And then there are last year's back-to-school hit, School's First Day of School, (review here) and this spring's hit done with Drew Daywalt, The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors. (see review here,) all off-beat and all hard to beat.

Thus spake Booklist: "Cheers for not only nutrition but for thinking outside the bowl to include the unfairly marginalized."

Making It in Middle School: Into the Woods: How I Survived Middle School by Nancy Krulik

With all my camping experience, the only thing I found worrisome about the trip was this whole packing thing.

I had to pick out clothes that were old enough that I wouldn't care if they got ruined or lost at camp, but cool enough to keep me from being teased by the Pops--our school's group of fashion police.

Joyce Kilmer Middle School's sixth and seventh graders are off for five fun-filled days at Camp Einstein, and as usual, Jenny is trying to survive the power struggle between the Pops, the "popular club" which now includes her former BFF Addie Wilson, and her new "non-Pops" friends. Her new girl friends--Sam, Chloe, Rachel, and Felicia--have requested that they share a cabin together with her, so Jenny's pre-camp jitters are pretty much limited to wardrobe worries.

But the camp directors have other ideas about social groupings, and Jenny, Chloe, and Sam find themselves stuck in a cabin with Addie and Dana Harrison, the queen of the Pops. Jenny, Chloe, and Sam resolve to avoid their Pops roomies as much as possible, but even though numbers are on their side, Jenny knows that they have their work cut out for them for the next five days.

This wasn't the regular world. This was the middle school world. And in our world Pops were more powerful than non-Pops no matter what the numbers. It was just the way it was.

Dana and Addie show up with a forbidden hair dryer and straightener and try to blame the non-Pops for them when they blow the camp's fuses. Caught with the contraband, Dana and Addie wind up on KP the first day, and out for revenge, Dana blames a "sprained ankle" acquired during a trust exercise on her non-Pops partner so that she can order her to fetch and carry for the next few days. The Pops heckle Jenny's friend Josh mercilessly, calling him "Mr. Science Geek," and his girlfriend "Ms. Science Geek" as they belittle his interest in nature studies.

The non-Pops get the last laugh, however, when Jenny shouts "Mouse!" in the cafeteria and Dana drops her crutches and nimbly hops atop a table. And when Addie's misuse of the compass gets the group lost on their night hike, Josh's knowledge of astronomy helps him to become a superstar when he locates the North Star and steers the group safely out of the woods and back to camp. As Jenny puts it philosophically,

That's the thing about middle school. Nothing ever stays the same.

One minute the Pops are the ones everybody wants to be around. Then suddenly everyone's dying to learn how to find the Big Dipper in the sky from Mr. Science Geek.

Nancy Krulik's recent Into The Woods (How I Survived Middle School) (Scholastic, 2009) joins her other books in the How I Survived Middle School series in offering both solid guidance and a light-handed humorous look at the sudden changes in everything that middle school brings.

For my posted review of the first book in the series, Can You Get An F In Lunch? (How I Survived Middle School) and some helpful nonfiction guides to middle school survival, take a look here.

Roll Video: Reel Life Starring Us by Lisa Greenwald

I'm standing in the second-floor bathroom shaking crunched-up potato chips from the bottom of my backpack.

This whole starting-a-new-school thing would be easier if I had a removable tattoo on my forehead or something, just so people would know I was cool in my old school. Really, I was.  Everyone was artsy in his or her own way. And it wasn't cliquey. I was cool. People liked me.

"Chipped already?" the girl at the sink asks me. "On your first day?"

"So, it's, like, a thing?" I asked. "I don't get it."

"You were chipped," she said. "Someone saw you and decided that you were a good target."

It was the job opportunity of a lifetime for both of Dina Gross's parents to move from their home in the Berkshires to Long Island. For Dina it's like moving to a new planet. Rockwood Hills Middle School is big, and the kids are cliquish. There are the custom-jeans-wearing queens and kings of the popular crowd, led by the biggest queen bee of all, Chelsea Stern, and her followers Kendall and Molly.  Then there's everyone else.  And  there's that strange custom of being "chipped," a stealthy and seemingly random "thing" that seems to happen to anyone who seems slightly different.

But Dina and Chelsea have one thing in common--both are entering a month late--Dina, because of the move and Chelsea because she's been out with mono. Their social studies class is already divided into groups working on major projects to be presented at the school's fiftieth anniversary celebration, and Mr. Valakis makes them a group of two and pointedly warns them to get busy catching up.

Dina sees a way to use her favorite hobby--video filmmaking--and she already has the skills and lingo from her old school's film class. Chelsea thinks going around sticking a camera in people's faces is embarrassingly lame, but she has her own problems, a secret she can't share with her even her best friends. Her dad has lost his high-paying job, and she's struggling to hide her limited budget from her shopping-crazed BFFs, and Chelsea knows that she's close to dropping into the masses of non-popular, frequently chipped kids at school. Reluctantly, she decides she has no choice but to go along with Dina's adventurous plan to include Sasha Preston, teen TV star and the best-known alum of Rockwood Hills Middle in their film, a daring plan in which the two would-be filmmakers find themselves pretending to be extras on location for Sasha's show in New York while Dina tries to talk their way into a video interview with the star.

Both girls discover that things are not always what they seem in the process of filming their classmates. Sasha Preston's powerful remembrances of the superficialities of her old middle school help them to see their social scene in a different way. As Dina tells Chelsea after their video's premier,

"You're going to say I'm a video nerd for saying this, but I'm going to say it anyway," Dina starts.

"Sometimes in order to really see things, you just have to look through a different lens."

"I don't think you're a video nerd," I say.

"I think you're right."

And I really, really mean that.

Both Chelsea and Dina see themselves and their classmates through a different lens in Lisa Greenwald's Reel Life Starring Us (Amulet Books/Abrams), a  young adult novel that takes a closeup shot of middle-school society through the alternating narratives of its two main characters. "This funny, nuanced tale offers keen observations on middle-school life," says Kirkus Reviews.

Greenwald's other popular 'tween books include My Life in Pink & Green, My Summer of Pink & Green, and Sweet Treats & Secret Crushes.

Snow Trail Snow Tale: Blizzard by John Rocca

THE FIRST FLAKE FELL BEFORE RECESS.

From his desk, a boy spots the first flake through his school's tall windows. The excitement is palpable in the classroom, as the students hope that this will be the first big snow of the winter. Yea!

SCHOOL CLOSED EARLY.

The boy and his sister trudge home in the snow, already high up on their boots. By the next morning the snow is too deep for them to open their front door.

SO WE WENT OUT THE WINDOW!

The kids play in the snow until they are too tired and wet to have fun anymore, and they resort to cocoa and camping out before the stove. The boy bones up on blizzard lore, reading Arctic Survival.

As more snow days go by, the children begin to tire of snow play and the family begins to run out of their favorite foods. Without milk, their cocoa is not the same, and their snacks are down to raisins dug out of the back of the pantry.

Snowbound for six days, the boy decides that only a certified survivalist like himself is up to the task of resupplying the family larder. And... there is one more thing...

HE WAS THE ONLY ONE LIGHT ENOUGH TO WALK ON THE SNOW.

He suits up, fashions tennis rackets into snowshoes, and with a list of necessities (peanut butter, coffee!) and sled in tow, heads out to the store, stopping by the neighbors to see if they need anything.

It's a post-blizzard scene outside as the boy plods through the snow-obliterated streets. He is a Arctic explorer, stopping to make a snow angel, checking out an igloo some kids have built, getting into their snowball fight, and breaking a trail toward the store, which he is happy to find OPEN.

He's a celebrated returning hero when he drops off supplies at the neighbor's house and when he stomps into his own yard, his dog barks out a fanfare:WOOOFFF!

There's milk for the cocoa, coffee for his parents, and the next day brings a loud but welcome sound in the snow-deadened landscape.

"SNOWPLOWS!"

It's civilization at last for the snow-weary family in Caldecott artist John Rocco's personal memoir of the blizzard of 1978, in his latest, Blizzard (Hyperion Books, 2014). Telling the story primarily through his art, Rocco makes good use of a palette of wintry whites and hues of blue, providing a delightful fisheye lens view of the town's snowbound landscape on a four-page foldout painting. In Rocco's impressive illustrations, it's a child's dream of the biggest blizzard ever, with snow fun and seven days off from school to boot. Special touches, such as the day of the week shown cleverly on each page--Monday in careful cursive on the class blackboard, Tuesday written in the snow by squirrel tracks, Thursday spelled out in spilled raisins from the box---add touches of humor throughout. As Kirkus says "The Caldecott honoree's pencil, watercolor and digital paint illustrations are reminiscent of Steven Kellogg in their light and line and detail, and readers will pore over the pages as they vicariously live through a blizzard,"

Boys to Men: Two for the Guys from Clements and Paulsen

For those guys who couldn't care less about the mushy stuff surrounding Father's Day, here are two funny but honest guy stories, with a bow to the importance of fathers and grandfathers, from two of the best in the business, Andrew Clements and Gary Paulsen.

Andrew Clements' The Janitor's Boy begins with fifth-grader Jack Rankin carrying out a school prank--with a bit of passive-aggressive attitude. Embarrassed by teasing about his father's job as the school's janitor, Jack plants a huge glob of bubblegum on a music room desk, knowing that it will be his dad's job to scrap it off. Convinced it's the perfect crime, Jack, usually a well-behaved student, is astounded to be called into the principal's office before the gum is barely cold. His punishment fits the crime--three weeks of janitorial duty with his dad, John Rankin, cleaning the desk he defaced and then the accumulated gum wads from all of the library and auditorium furniture.

As Jack works out his after-school penance, though, he begins to get another view of his father, not as just a loser in green polyester work clothes, but as a complex and honorable man whose adolescent battles with his own father led him to quit school and enlist in the Viet Nam-era army. When Jack sneaks a key to explore the unknown "steam tunnel" beneath the school, he accidentally locks himself in the underground beneath the city streets and meets a troubled teenager living there who knows more about John Rankin than his son Jack does. Fifth-grader Jack learns about the many people his father has helped over the years and begins to understand a bit more about what it means to be an honorable man.

As in his many popular books, from Frindle to his recent No Talking, Clements unfailingly uses humor and insight to show boys the way to their own coming of age.

Another writer with undisputed mojo in the area of guy stories is Newbery author Gary Paulsen. He has writen serious coming-of-age survival stories like Hatchet, but he's also a pro in the area of humorous novels, as in his recent hit Lawn Boy.

I don't have a clue how all this will end.

One minute I was twelve years old and wondering where I could get enough money for an inner tube for my old used ten-speed. I didn't have any money and my parents didn't have much either.

The next minute, it seems, I've got a business of my own, with employees, and I'm rich.

I'd better explain.

It all began at nine in the morning on my twelfth birthday when my grandmother gave me an old riding mower.

Unable to resist starting up the battered old mower left by his recently deceased and much-missed Grampa, the narrator tries it out on his family's scruffy grass, and as he's making a few passes, trying to dodge the shrubs and his mom's few flowers, he gets his first mowing job from a neighbor. It seems that the regular lawn-care guy has been run out of town for some shady dealings and the local homeowners are desperate for someone to do their lawns on the cheap. Business snowballs by word of mouth, and soon the kid is mowing dawn to dark, eating lunch on the mower, and still falling behind on his commitments.

Enter Arnold Howell, a pudgy, currently down-on-his luck day trader, whose lawn needs a mowing, and who, being in a temporary negative cash flow situation, offers to invest his payment in the stock market. Over a glass of iced tea, Arnold learns that the kid is overbooked and hooks him up with a day laborer named Pasqual who needs work. As business continues to build, Pasqual brings in some "cousins" to do some of the overflow mowing, and before he knows it, the kid finds himself co-ordinating his work force and raking in the profits, which Arnold is happy to reinvest for him. One of Arnold's moneymaking schemes pays off double when he and the kid are shaken down by a seedy protection racketeer and the boxer Arnold has invested in provides some much needed muscle.

By the end of the summer, to the amazement of his unsuspecting but grateful parents, the kid has amassed a small fortune. As his grandmother sums up the summer in her own inimitable way, "You know, dear, Grampa always said, take care of your tools and they'll take care of you."

Paulsen's comic touch is evidenced in the B-School jargon he uses for chapter titles, such as "The Law of Increasing Product Demand Versus Flat Production Capacity" and "Overutilization of Labor Compounded by Unpredicted Capital Growth." Thanks to Grampa and his old mower, this twelve-year-old's first venture into capitalism will keep kids laughing all his way to the bank.

Back to the Future: Blast from the Past (Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls) by Meg Cabot

The minute Mrs. Hunter said we were going on a field trip, everyone in room 209 went bananas.

Because Room 209 had never been on a field trip before. At least, not while I had been there.

The girls all squealed with delight. The boys all fist-bumped one another. Patrick Day, who sits on the end of my row, jumped up on top of his desk and played air guitar until Rosemary pulled him down by the belt loops of his jeans. Joey Fields began barking like a dog.

The truth was, however, I was pretty excited myself, due to one simple but embarrassing fact.

I had never been on a field trip before.

Allie Finkle had thought her worst problem was that even though she had been completely responsible and earned $36 to buy her own cell phone, her parents said no. No cell phone until sixth grade. Period.

And then comes the field trip. At first Allie is thrilled. At last she gets to ride on a school bus, a lifelong dream, denied her because of chicken pox. floods in the nature park, and the perfidy of her former friend Mary Kay Shiner, who offered to turn in Allie's permission slip for the trip to the Children's Museum and then conveniently lost it. Finally, Allie will get to climb on one of those mysterious big yellow buses, sing those goofy bus songs, and if she's lucky, get one of those seats over the rear wheels that bounces you up in the air whenever the bus hits a pothole. Even if the trip is just an educational outing to boring old Honeypot Prairie Recreation Village to culminate their Pioneer Life unit, she just knows she and her three best friends are going to have a blast in the past.

But field-trip disaster strikes again. No, the trip isn't cancelled, which would have been preferable! But to conserve funds, Allie's class has to share the bus with Mrs. Myers' fourth grade class from Walnut Knolls Elementary--Allie's "old school" with her worst frenemies, Brittany Hauser and her devoted followers--and Mary Kay Shiner! And to make things even worse, her new class's version of Brittany, Cheyenne O'Malley, shows up in a rented theatrical costume version of pioneer dress in yellow silk, complete with parasol, and Brittany & Co. are decked out in specially made pioneer garb with matching bonnets to boot.

It's Allie's worst nightmare. Cheyenne and Brittany, double trouble, are drawn to each other's glow like moths to the flame, and she, Allie Finkle, is assigned to be trip buddy with none other than Mary Kay Shiner. And Allie thought the only problem on the bus was the de rigueur field trip barfer (Joey Fields-who else?--who takes care of that job right away). But now she has to deal with the augmented clique's barbs and putdowns, including the whole bus's being treated to a revival of the hated nickname Brittany hung on her during her last miserable days at Walnut Knolls--ALLIE STINKLE!

Even Allie's accumulated notebook of Rules for Girls has a hard time covering the contingencies of this new experience. But Allie gets surprising help from an unexpected source--George Washington--when she notices his own set of rules, made up when he was a boy--posted on the one-room school's walls. Allie discovers that George has some of the same rules she does, and she puts most of them to use to get her through the day, in Meg Cabot's sixth entry in her popular series, Allie Finkle's Rules For Girls #6: Blast from the Past (Scholastic, 2010), and this time Allie rises to the occasion when she even volunteers to stay in the first aid cabin with the bee-stung Mary Kay and proves herself the most responsible one in either class.

"It wasn't as fun as the Children's Museum would have been, I said finally. "But I think I learned a lot of new stuff."

"But learning new stuff is actually the point of field trips, Allie," Mom said.

I had never thought about it that way before. I had sort of always thought of field trips as just being about having fun.

"Yeah," I said. "I guess it sort of is."

Mighty Mouse: Malcolm at Midnight by W.H. Beck

Dear Readers,
I found the following note and story on my desk when I came in to work one morning. Who wrote it? Well, I have my ideas...

Mr. Mark Binney, fifth grade teacher

Dear Mr. Binney,
You asked us how that ring came to be on your desk the morning after the Dedication Day Carnival. You said we could leave you an anonymous note. That you just wanted--needed--to know. Well, it took a while, but here it is. Some parts you may recognize; some parts might get you mad. But all of it is true.

A lot happens in a school when the teachers aren't looking.
Sincerely,
Your Student

With W. H. Beck's first novel, Malcolm at Midnight (Houghton Mifflin, 2012), to say that Malcolm's life is a cliff-hanger is an understatement. Rejected by purchasers of python-fodder rats because he's the runt of his litter, Malcolm is in luck when a commission-craving pet store clerk passes him off as a mouse to make the sale to fifth-grade teacher Mr. Binney.  Malcolm has no choice except to go with the mouse thing and  finds himself fortunately transported into a pampered life as a class pet living in a plush rodent habitat.  His rodent chow is way more edible than the sawdusty pellets at the pet store, and doting fifth graders even ply their new pet "mouse" with the occasional raspberry Pop-Tart or peanut butter cracker crumbs. Malcolm finds that he enjoys Mr. Binney's lessons and soon discovers that he can read, leading him to form a friendship with one of the students, Amanda. He also has another discovery: his posh cage has an easily disarmed latch, and for a nocturnal rodent, free range exploration is mouse, er, rat heaven.

Malcolm's midnight rambles soon lead him to discover the Midnight Academy, a society of school pets dedicted to the preservation of McKenna School and the well-being of the nutters (students) and lankies (staff) who depend upon it. Although several members, notably Honey Bunny, a large Kindergarten rabbit, express some doubts as to his mouse credentials, Malcolm becomes a novice pledge, taken under the wing (actually within curve of her impressive tail) of the venerable leader, Aggy the iguana. Hamsters Billy (the Kid) and Jesse (James) take Malcolm on midnight tours to show him the ropes, and Malcolm feels that even impersonating a mouse, he has found a place where he belongs. Listening to Mr. Binney's admonition to his kids to be "the best fifth grader you can be," Malcolm is determined to be the "best rat he can be." But that task proves harder than he thought.

Something is going wrong in McKenna School. As the big Dedication Day Carnival approaches, Malcolm notices a cascade of strange events. Mr. Binney seems to have lost the little sapphire ring he's been keeping in a tiny jewel box in his pocket. Exploring the mysterious unused fourth floor, Malcolm meets, not the reputed moaning ghost of the clock tower, but a more serious scourge of McKenna, the malevolent  and shunned cat Snip, whose evil aim, aside from eating Malcolm, of course, is to destroy the community of pet animals and the students as well. But to be the best rat he can be, Malcolm knows that he has to go rogue himself and uncover the frightening secrets afoot on that dark and dusty fourth floor. What he discovers is more than a mere cat-and-mouse threat, but a plot between Snip and an unknown accomplice to sicken and perhaps destroy nutters and lankies and the very community that is McKenna School.

A mouse-sized hero is not new to children's literature, but Malcolm is a worthy successor to Timothy in O'Connor's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, Avi's Poppy, DiCamillo's The Tale of Despereaux, and Hildegard of Lowry's Bless This Mouse. Convinced of his rat lineage by Clyde, scarred denizen of the dumpster, Malcolm determines to make the most of his rattiness--agility, tenacity, and his ability to survive, and survive he does--nearly being rendered by Beert, the barn owl "ghost" of the tower, snared by Snip repeatedly, and finally using the automatic toilet flusher to send himself down the pipes to arrive in the basement furnace room in time to gnaw his way through the school's rusty pipes and foil the final step of Snip's perfidious plan.

Beck's narrative has it all, impeccable storytelling, with adventure after adventure tumbling through the chapters toward an inevitable but still surprising climax, great character development from the annoying Kiera, gossip-monger of Mr. Binney's class, the library aquarium fish Oscar who begins by trying to eat Malcolm's tail and becomes his wisest mentor, Ms. Grumble-the-Bumble, the custodian who provides an unexpected romantic twist to the plot (remember that missing ring that turns up on Mr. Binney's desk?), and even the unredeemed and seemingly irredeemable Snip, whose malevolent warped mind is the result of a sadly missed communication twenty years before, discovered too late to save her from her self-inflicted but well deserved end.

Unforgettable and universal animal and human characters and a story in the grandest tradition of animal fantasies, undergirded with a strong double theme of the value of being the best individual we can be and yet part of an ongoing community, amazingly illustrations in pencil and graphite drawings by notable artist Brian Lies, all make Malcolm at Midnight a potential classic, an engaging and enlightening experience for the middle reader, a great read-aloud novel for the classroom, and a must-have for all school libraries. An exceptional first novel by a very promising and already proficient author. 

Sophomore Strange: The Suburban Strange by Nathan Kotecki

"We’re a set of small black shiny beads who string around together, finding beauty the rest of the world has overlooked,” said Regine. Celia thought this was a description she should remember, but she couldn’t make sense of it. The driver continued, “The Rosary is just the name we’ve given ourselves. But to describe us, I’d say we are the cognoscenti.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Celia said.

"So you see how we are, right?" Regine said to Celia. "Some kids might give you a hard time, and some kids are gong to want to be friends with you just because you're friends with us. You decide who is worth your time"

Celia is an tall, awkward sophomore transfer student to Suburban High, inexplicably adopted because of her drawing talent in a shared summer art course with Regine, taken in as a novice member to their group, who dress in stark, sophisticated black and drive to school in three dark sedans,  which bring memories of her father's funeral instantly to Celia's mind. Attired by Regine in blacks and greys, Celia finds that membership in the Rosary gives her instant status, protecting her from the harassment that drove her from her old school.

But all is not well at Suburban High. As the fall semester begins, girls experience a dangerous series of strange mishaps at school on the day before their sixteenth birthday. The rumor mill soon turns out a theory of an evil curse which strikes in varied ways, bee stings which bring on anaphylactic shock, falls down staircases, concussions on snow walkways, choking in the cafeteria. At first Celia is not worried; her own birthday in April is far away, and the whole idea seems too preposterous to be true. Celia enjoys the Rosary's oversight, encountering dark. intriguing music, art,  music, and relishing the Rosary's weekly trips to a mysteriously sophisticated club, Diaboliques, where she enjoys the stares of Tomasi, a darkly handsome young man who watches her from across the room.

At school, Celia befriends a very different girl, her chemistry lab partner Mariette, who is everything her Rosary friends are not--bubbly, dressed in nondescript but bright clothes with flyaway reddish curls. But Mariette seems gifted, able to improvise their lab experiments with no need for timing or exact measurements, infinitely kind, but somehow surrounded by a strangely magical aura, seemingly able to tame even Mr. Sumoletso, their chem teacher known to be incredibly demanding. In fact, their whole class performs amazingly well with Mariette there while his other classes struggle to pass.

But as the year moves on, more girls suffer increasingly serious mishaps on the eve of their sixteenth birthdays, and Mariette gradually reveals to Celia that she is one of the Kind, practitioners of white magic, and that she is struggling to use her nascent powers to protect these girls against someone at the school, someone who is obviously one of the Unkind, one whose continued power requires that he obtain a dying girl's last breath. And then, despite her developing powers to foil the evil Unkind's plan, Mariette herself drowns on the eve of her birthday in the school's new swimming pool.

Celia cannot shake her memory of discovering Mariette there:

...  red hair slicked across her blue-gray forehead and cheeks, ...mouth gaped open, eyes ...closed.

Celia realizes that she knows who the murderer must be, and without Mariette's protection,, she may be the next victim.

Nathan Kotecki's just published The Suburban Strange (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) combines a story of a strange high school clique with a meta-fictional fantasy mystery. Slow paced at first, this story builds inexorably toward the final confrontation between Celia and the Unkind murderer, in a world divided between "citizens," those who live obliviously in the real world,  the Kind, the forces of good, and the Unkind, the forces of evil. Kotecki thankfully avoids peopling this familiar struggle with the usual array of faery folk, werewolves, or vampires, but even so, Celia and Mariette seem the only "real" teenagers in Kotecki's often surreal surroundings, a feature which may turn off some readers. Other young adult readers who are devotees of fantasy set within in a seemingly prosaic high school setting, may relish this cosmic struggle of good and evil, especially since the book ends with the tantalizing hint of a sequel.

Ball Hog: Soccer Showoff by Jake Maddox and Margaret Gurevich

Gina Gozalez noticed the sign as soon as she approached River City Middle School--HOME OF THE RIVER CITY RAIDERS!


Gina smiled. That could be my new team, she thought. I could be a Raider!

Then her stomach tightened. River City Middle School was at least twice the size of her old school.

All I have to do is make it through the day, Gina thought. Then I can go to soccer tryouts.

After school, as she gathers with the others on the pitch, Gina is feeling lucky. The other girls are friendly, and Rachel and Lara admit that they need some new players to improve their record over last year's. Gina had been a star on her old school's team, and she hopes that if she does her best, she can make the team at River City.

Coach Grant sets pairs of girls to work on passing, dribbling, and shooting, and Gina and her partner Rachel get a special "Nice work!" from the coach when Gina's strong kicks get past the goalie. Gina knows that she is a terrible goalie, and sure enough, when it's her turn she misses most of Rachel's shots. But when the selections for the team go up the next day Gina's name is on the list. Gina is sure the Coach Grant noticed her special scoring abilities, and she can't wait to have her chance to show off what she can do as a shooter.

But in the first games, Gina doesn't get many opportunities to score. It seem like every time they take the ball downfield, one of her teammates bobbles a pass or has the ball stolen by the opponents before they have it in range for Gina to score.

Gina was frustrated. All this teamwork is slowing us down, she thought.

I wish I could just run down the field myself and score a goal.

And with her team behind in the second half, Gina gets the ball and has to make a choice.

The Tiger's defenders were closing in. From the corner of her eye, Gina saw that Lara was wide open.

From the sidelines, Coach Grant yelled, "Pass! Pass!"

But Gina took aim and kicked the ball. It curved toward the goal and sailed into the back of the net. Score!

If I can just stay on the ball, we'll definitely win, thought Gina.

And the Raider's get the win, thanks to Gina's play, but the others don't seem as excited as they should. Becca complains that Gina is not the only one on the team, and instead of praising her for saving the game, without a smile Coach reminds her that soccer is a team sport. What is wrong with these people? Didn't they want to win? Gina thinks.

At the next game, Gina is determined to try to score on her own. Despite two of her teammates signaling that they are open, Gina tries to take the ball all the way down field. This time, however, the defender steals the ball just as she gets ready to kick, and the Mariners get the goal.

Gina is benched.

"This team isn't about one person!" Coach said.

One of the significant values of team sports is teamwork, and that is the theme of Soccer Show-Off (Jake Maddox Girl Sports Stories) (Capstone Books) No matter how good she may be, Gina gets it that being a ball hog doesn't pay off in the long run--in more ways than one. Gurevich paces this sports story well, with equal time for gameplay description and personal relationships within the group. Illustrated by Katie Wood's full-page black-and-white vignettes, with a glossary and field position diagram and descriptions of soccer positions, this book offers an introduction to playing the game for young players with special attention to the indescribable essence of teamwork.

Becca sighed. "We're all on the team because, duh, we all love soccer!
"If we win, we do it together."

Gina laughed. "And if we lose, we do that together too."