#MMGM: Schooled by Jamie Sumner
ABOUT THE BOOK
Eleven-year-old Lenny Syms is about to start college—sort of. As part of a brand-new experimental school, Lenny and four other students are starting sixth grade on a university campus, where they’ll be taught by the most brilliant professors and given every resource imaginable. This new school is pretty weird, though. Instead of hunkering down behind a desk to study math, science, and history, Lenny finds himself meditating, participating in discussions where you don’t even have to raise your hand, and spying on the campus population in the name of anthropology.
But Lenny just lost his mom, and his Latin professor dad is better with dead languages than actual human beings. Lenny doesn’t want to be part of some learning experiment. He just wants to be left alone. Yet if Lenny is going to make it as a middle schooler on a college campus, he’s going to need help. Is a group of misfit sixth graders and one particularly quirky professor enough to pull him out of his sadness and back into the world?
REVIEW
Lenny Syms misses his mom and struggles to relate to his dad. Attending an experimental school on the campus of the university his father teaches at, Lenny finds himself struggling to adapt to all the changes in his life. Everything that reminds him of his mom sits in storage where Lenny goes to grieve in private. Lenny, in frustration, avoids doing what the professors teaching the 5 students expect, but finds himself reluctantly attending the class on fairy tales taught by an older professor he met one day on campus. But avoidance only works for so long. Can his fellow students and a lesson on Anubis help him face his grief, save his relationship with his father, and make the best of his new situation? Lenny makes an appealing protagonist. His struggle to adapt to a completely changed life without his mother creates a heart-touching situation. His emotions shine through in the choices he makes in connecting with VW, the elderly professor, and his classmate, Hen, whose tender care of him helps him adjust. Ultimately, the strength of the story is in the characters and the relationships that develop between them. The students each have their own strengths and weaknesses and come across very much as 12-year-olds, part child and part teen. The way the school is depicted adds an interesting subplot as Lenny and the other kids work on projects while sitting in on university classes of interest to them. One of my favorite aspects of the story other than the relationships between the characters relates to how the professor's have to adapt to students as much as the students have to adapt to their unusual classes. A winning tale about growing up, grieving, and finding one's own path with the help of others. Highly recommended.
Comments
Post a Comment