A Villain You'll Love to Hate (Review of FIRST FLIGHT | Sean Hayden & Connor Hayden)

TITLE: First Flight (The Magnificent Steam Carnival of Professor Pelusian Minus)
AUTHOR: Sean Hayden and Connor Hayden
PUBLISHER: Echelon Press
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2011
PAGES: 141 KB (e-book only)
GRADE LEVEL(S): 4-6
RELEVANT CURRICULA: English Language Arts
CLASSROOM USES: Summer/Independent reading, Literature Circles, Read-Aloud

NB: This is the first book in a 6-book series. At time of writing, 2 of the 6 books are available to the public. [UPDATE: The third book is now available.]

Professor Pelusian Minus is more slave driver than carnival proprietor. He loves money and meanness, and not much else. As a reader, I loved to hate him. Minus's actions all contain some amount of venom. He doesn't get up from chairs; he slams them against walls. He calls his minions--er, employees--idiots and morons, and he terrorizes and denigrates the best performers in his carnival.

Minus is a car-wreck of a character: you can hardly stand to look at him, but at the same time, you won't want to miss a single one of his evil words or deeds.

Conversely, brother Dade and sister Paige are just the kind of heroes for whom any reader will want to root. They are kind and protective toward one another, while at the same time sly operators against Professor Minus. On top of that, they're blessed with considerable ingenuity. The irony, of course, is that their inventors' spirits are not only their only hope for escaping Minus's carnival, but also the carnival's only hope of making minus rich. As such, he'll do all in his power to keep them there.

First Flight, well, flies. The story is fast-paced, and the pages are few. It's the perfect book to use for a read-aloud in the last few minutes of class, or to give to a reluctant reader who is wary of a too-long story. Written by author Sean Hayden and his son, Connor, the language strikes a perfect balance: there's an economy of language that demonstrates Sean Hayden's finely honed craft as a writer, paired perfectly with the kind of exuberance that only a student writing for other students could produce.

I could go on, but suffice it to say, First Flight is well worth both your time and your money. At $0.99, it may even be worth the price of that e-reader you've been eyeing. (Note: you can get the Kindle app for almost any mobile device or personal computer for free.) Once you've read First Flight, I'd recommend saving your allowance and putting another five dollars aside. You'll want to move on to Second Chance right away, and you'll be drooling to get your hands on the last four installments.



FTC Disclosure: This review is based on a copy of the book we received from the authors.

Review: THE HUNGER GAMES (Book 1 of the trilogy) | Suzanne Collins

TITLE: The Hunger Games

AUTHOR: Suzanne Collins

PUBLISHER: Scholastic, Inc.

DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2008

PAGES: 374

GRADE LEVEL(S): 7-8

RELEVANT CURRICULA: English Language Arts

CLASSROOM USES: Class reading, Literature Circles

BRIDGE TEXTS: The Giver, What Is The What?, Fahrenheit 451

NB: This review is based on the text of Book 1 of The Hunger Games Trilogy. Later reviews will cover the remainder of the series.

Adolescence is marked by struggling to find the line between right and wrong, between making choices and following directions. Every day of his life, every middle school students feels that his free will has been undermined, that he has suffered some injustice. It is the condition of being an adolescent.

What student hasn’t felt trapped—either at home, at school, or both? What student hasn’t felt that she has been wrongly vilified due to some arbitrary decision made by an authority figure? What student hasn’t attempted to elude the watchful eye of a parent, teacher, or administrator, hasn’t broken some rule in order to achieve something that she knows just has to be done. And what student hasn’t felt, at one time or another, that she has been pitted against her peers for no good reason? 

The Hunger Games attacks all of these adolescent struggles in a fast-paced story that teaches strong lessons, but never feels didactic.

The story is set in an almost post-Apocalyptic version of North America called Panem, in which the main role of government is to suppress any sort of uprising of the micro-communities under its control. Each “District” is self-contained, except for once a year, when one boy and one girl from each locality are sent to the capital for a televised fight to the death. The “tributes,” as they are called, are to serve as reminders of the complete control that the central government has over its citizens.

Katniss Everdeen—the book’s heroine and narrator—has fought to survive for most of her life, but never on the level that she will when she is sent as a tribute in the Hunger Games. She faces the very same issues that every student faces in their own lives—feeling trapped, victimized, forced to break the rules—but on a scale they can only imagine.

Parents have protested the inclusion of the Hunger Games Trilogy as required reading in their children’s school’s curricula, and there are legitimate questions to be raised about the content. The Hunger Games does not portray adults—particularly those in positions of authority—in a favorable light. Events of the book are sometimes violent, and almost always hard to fathom.

Ultimately, however, The Hunger Games provides teachers and parents to broach difficult issues. Moral issues abound in this novel, but even for those who want schools to avoid as much as possible the teaching of moral issues, this book cannot be ignored. Students will relate to Katniss and her plight, and The Hunger Games is a wonderful tool to get students to think about big questions. Keep it out of schools, and—don’t look now, but—you’ll be putting the same kind of restraints against students and teachers as the rule-makers in Panem’s capital city put on their districts.

Review: WHEN YOU REACH ME | Rebecca Stead

TITLE: When You Reach Me
AUTHOR: Rebecca Stead
PUBLISHER: Wally Lamb Books
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2009
PAGES: 208
GRADE LEVEL(S): 5-7
RELEVANT CURRICULA: English
CLASSROOM USES: Required reading, Summer/Independent reading, Literature Circles
BRIDGE TEXTS: A Wrinkle In Time


The first time I wrote anything--in fact, the only time I wrote anything--about When You Reach Me, I could hardly think of words to do the book justice. I quoted from commentary from Nancy Pearl on NPR (which was how I first learned about the book), and then wrote:

When You Reach Me is a wonderful descendant of Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time; it never once even comes close to imitation, or cheap knock-offery.  No, it's the classiest of descendants--it's an evolution.

One of the most beautiful aspects of fantasy is how completely it takes the reader from her/his own world into that of the novel. What better way for students to learn first-hand of the magic of literature than by being transported to the planet Uriel? Or to Narnia? Or Middle-earth? Or Oz?


But Stead's novel takes place in New York City. (No doubt, NYC can be magical and unreal, but it's no outer space...) Miranda, Stead's protagonist, is a relatively normal girl, living in a relatively normal world, with the everyday drama that inhabits the world of every 11 year-old. 


The fantastical elements of When You Reach Me are subtler than magic or space travel. Stead's fantasy world is more mysterious than magical, as Miranda receives unexplained notes about events yet-to-happen in her life. Miranda is understandably skeptical; this could as easily be a prank as it is magic, and neither Miranda nor the reader has to take a huge leap of faith to feel that life is carrying on more or less as usual.


This fantasy-based-in-realism approach is sheer brilliance. By staying firmly rooted in real-world places and problems, Stead's novel will appeal to students who may already possess a bit of world-weary reluctance to get fully sucked into a novel. Any reader unwilling to blast into outer space will slowly but surely get sucked in by the bully on the block or the struggles of growing up with a single parent. But magic will just seep in, slowly but surely--and before long, When You Reach Me will make readers out of kids today in the same way that A Wrinkle In Time made readers of them in 1962.

Review: LITTLE BROTHER | Cory Doctorow

TITLE: Little Brother
AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
PUBLISHER: Tor (Tom Doherty Associates, LLC)
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2008
PAGES: 365
GRADE LEVEL(S): 9-10
RELEVANT CURRICULA: English, American History, Contemporary Affairs, Ethics
CLASSROOM USES: Required reading, Summer/Independent reading, Literature Circles
BRIDGE TEXTS: 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The 9/11 Commission Report

Why do we ban books in our schools and libraries? To protect our students, right? They are young and impressionable, and we must protect their fragile minds. So we block off books that contain profanity, references to sex, or drugs and alcohol, or subversive ideas.

So, let’s give Little Brother the test. Profanity? Check. Sex, drugs, alcohol? Check, check, check. Subversive ideas? Double check.

Doctorow’s main character and narrator is a 17 year-old high school student with a penchant for using technology to scare up excitement. He starts innocently enough, hacking his school-owned laptop so that he can IM friends during classes or putting rocks in his shoes to fool the gait-recognition technology in the school’s security cameras. When Marcus’s hacking exploits make him a terrorism suspect in the eyes of the Department of Homeland Security, his world changes in nearly every possible way. His friendships are pushed to the limit, he wonders why his parents can’t see his point of view, and he loses faith in his government as an advocate for the innocent and guarantor of freedom.

Most high school students will never be terror suspects, or even much more adept with computers than to load basic software and create powerpoint presentations for class projects. But they can all relate to friendships on the skids, feeling estranged from parents, or worrying that the system has somehow abandoned them. Students will relate to Marcus Yallow’s story.

While students will find an ally in Marcus, teachers will find an excellent vehicle for a variety of lessons and units. Coming of age. Loss of innocence. Personal privacy versus national security. To what extent does the government’s responsibility lie more in protecting its citizens’ constitutional rights, and to what extent are those rights expendable in the interest of public safety?

There is no end to fodder for discussion and debate in this novel; creative teachers will see opportunities for all manner of classroom activities and cross-curricular assignments. But before throwing this book into the syllabus, teachers are going to have to answer questions about the profanity, the sex, drugs, and alcohol, and (perhaps most of all) the subversive ideas. Doctorow’s position in this novel is not, shall we say, “fair and balanced.” Detractors will point to the book’s overt liberalism and anti-government sentiments. Any of these fears can be allayed easily enough with a well-written rationale and some ancillary reading material that presents a more conservative viewpoint.

The alternative is to leave this book out of classrooms and libraries altogether, to add it to another list of banned books. Over the years, we’ve banned William Chaucer, James Joyce, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, and the Bible. Among such company, it could be a real honor for Doctorow were his book to be banned—but to keep this book from kids would be a real miscarriage of justice.