Mrs. Ravenbach's Way

December 15, 2015
A tyrannical fourth-grade teacher wreaks havoc in a young boy's life, until a day of reckoning changes everything. When Tobias Wilcox transfers to the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children, the order-and-discipline-obsessed Mrs. Ravenbach becomes his fourth-grade teacher. Outwardly cheery and self-aggrandizing, this proud product of a German education is also reminiscent of Roald Dahl's evil Miss Trunchbull from Matilda and Professor Umbridge of Harry Potter fame. Akers employs a mix of grade-school ramblings and complex storytelling strategies to explore censorship, honesty, and the uneven power dynamics among teachers, students, parents, and administrators. Mrs. Ravensbach herself narrates events, and Toby's perspective is folded in via journals, the minutes of the submarine-enthusiasts club over which Toby presides, and school poetry. Judging by the book's potent "un-dedication," Akers, a screenwriter and film-studies teacher, is processing frustrations from his own history with this debut novel, the first in the Amazing Escapades of Toby Wilcox series. The over-the-top kid antics will delight readers with similar challenges. However, while the provocative German stereotypes and occasional violent daydreams may have passed as "for kids eyes only" fare in an earlier era, they may not play as well in today's environment. An edgy, subversive revenge fantasy in which kids speak truth to power. (Fiction. 9-11)

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June 1, 2016

Gr 5 Up-This first in a planned series introduces Toby Wilcox as he starts fourth grade at the McKegway School for Clever & Gifted Children and immediately clashes with Mrs. Ravenbach, a teacher in the vein of Matilda's Miss Trunchbull. Mrs. Ravenbach, a self-described "wonderfully German woman," values "order and discipline" above all else. Now striving for her fifth Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching, she isn't about to let Toby, a "sweaty tub of sass," get in her way. Of course her plot to get him expelled backfires, and Toby's own clever plan exposes her in front of the whole school. The story is told mostly from Mrs. Ravenbach's point of view, with Toby's journal entries interspersed. A decidedly mean-spirited tale (Mrs. Ravenbach gleefully frightens Toby into wetting himself in front of the class; Toby's journal entries detail all the violent ways he would like to get revenge). VERDICT This may be more appealing to adults who still have revenge fantasies about their childhood teachers.-Laurie Slagenwhite Walters, Brighton District Library, Brighton, MI

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