This Journal Belongs to Ratchet

reagan113 - The book This Journal Belongs to Ratchet is written by Nancy J. Cavanaugh. This book is about a young girl who would give up just about anything to be a normal girl, with a normal family, name, clothes, friends, and school life. Ratchet, a homeschooled girl, who helps her dad work in the garage on cars, tries to fit in with the kids on her street, her dad makes that very hard for her. Ratchets dad believes in saving trees and is overall echo friendly but when the local park is going to be turned into a mall he objects and gets himself into community service time. They set him up to teach a class on building go carts, the boys in the class make fun of Ratchet and her dad. One boy reaches out to her and asks her to help with his go cart. They become really good friends and work together to help save the park. I really loved the plot to this book, I really enjoyed this book overall mostly because of its format. This book is written out like Ratchets homeschool assignments, either a poem, journal, or a news article. I liked this feature because it was different from any books I have read, I think it's meant to be different because it shows how Ratchet is different and the book is written in a different format that other books. I know that this book is realistic fiction because Ratchet and other characters don't have any powers, they aren't any talking or inanimate objects that take on human traits. I think this book is really a book written for girls. I think this because it's about a girl who has a crush and what's to know if he likes her back, and I think that it is more a girl centered topic, this would be a good book for 6th or 7th graders because some kids might not understand global warming and this book focus on global warming and the problem. One internal conflict is when Ratchet makes a decision to ask her dad abort the box that she suspected that has something to do with her mom. She considered not asking but quickly changed her mind repeatedly. One external conflict is when Ratchet is looking for the box but finds out her dad moved what was inside it and threw away the box, she fought verbally with him multiple times.

March 11, 2013
Eleven-year-old Ratchet records her observations, complaints (“Everything in my life is old and recycled”), worries, and goals (“To be a girl who fits in—hopefully one with a friend”) in a series of writing exercises for her language arts “class” (she’s homeschooled by her single father) in Cavanaugh’s debut novel. But fitting in is difficult for a girl nicknamed after a mechanic’s tool, who doesn’t have a mother, doesn’t attend a “real” school, and spends her days helping her “crazy environmentalist” father fix cars. Worse, her father’s outspoken political views have won him the wrong kind of publicity around town, and his battle to save Moss Tree Park from becoming a strip mall looks like a lost cause. Cavanaugh uses bold, often humorous first-person narration to capture the essence of an unconventional heroine struggling to figure out who she is supposed to be. Ratchet’s journal—written on lined paper and filled with a medley of lists, poems, stories, essays, and doodles—offers an enticing blend of strong social views, family secrets, and deeply felt emotions. Ages 9–up. Agent: Holly Root, Waxman Leavell Literary Agency.

Starred review from March 15, 2013
An 11-year-old home-schooled girl who longs to live like everyone else learns that her strange life with her father may be weird, but it's also wonderful. Ratchet, whose real name is Rachel, lives with her father, a "crazy environmentalist," who believes that he has a God-given mission to save the Earth. In consequence, Ratchet, who lost her mom when she was 5, wears thrift-shop clothing and helps her father repair cars in their driveway. This makes her both an able mechanic and a magnet for the derision of the neighborhood kids. Ratchet longs to go to school, to buy cute clothing and, most significantly, to make a friend. In a book that is full of surprises, it turns out that assisting her protest-junkie father in his court-ordered community service as a go-cart-building instructor is the catalyst she needs. This is how she will find female helpers and role models, make a friend and even save a little piece of the world. The story has a gimmick; it consists entirely of entries in the language-arts notebook Ratchet uses to record her home-school assignments. At first it seems artificial, with observations that are too on-the-nose. But as the novel's unexpectedly multifaceted plot comes together, it becomes increasingly compelling, suspenseful and moving. Triumphant enough to make readers cheer; touching enough to make them cry. (Fiction. 9-13)

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