Oh, Snap!

June 1, 2013
The fourth installment of the Cruisers series finds Zander Scott and friends unwittingly involved in an international investigation. Zander, Bobbi, LaShonda and Kambui are middle school students at Harlem's Da Vinci Academy for the Gifted and Talented. Their alternative newspaper, The Cruiser, came in third on the School Journalism Association's list of best school newspapers. Good for them, not so good for Ashley Schmidt, editor of Da Vinci's official newspaper, The Palette, which received no recognition. "I'm going to bury you and your stupid newspaper!" hisses Ashley, who's planning on a monthly reprinting of 200 words from the British newspaper the Guardian to borrow a bit of glory. Zander decides to do the same and somehow thinks it's a good idea to tell the folks at London's Phoenix School about the pictures Kambui took that place their "Genius Gangsta" friend Phat Tony at the mall when a robbery occurred there. Tony denies being at the mall, and the Cruisers haven't told anyone else about the pictures, so the British school contacts Scotland Yard, and now Zander and company may be in big trouble. As with the previous three installments, this sparkles with intelligent dialogue and clever banter, all while advancing a story in which Zander ponders journalism, academics, girls, and even the Fibonacci sequence and the grand design of the universe. Myers once again offers a story of smart kids living out their middle school days as Cruisers "on the high seas of life." (Fiction. 9-13)

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May 15, 2013
Grades 5-8 The Cruisers is a popular middle-grade series, and the fourth volume does not disappoint. This time our four budding urban journalists are psyched that their underground publication, The Cruiser, was named the third-best school newspaper in the city, an honor that doesn't sit well with the official school newspaper, which ups its game. This pushes narrator Zander to hastily get involved with the case of Phat Tony, a wannabe rapper classmate who may be involved in a robbery at the local mall. Zander and the gang don't want to rat anyone outwho knows if Phat Tony is really the gangsta he pretends to be?but if they don't fess up, they could be considered accessories to a crime. Myers proves once again that he is a master of writing smart, realistic kids without ever depicting them as preternaturally wise or philosophical. The plot is optimistic but not tidy, and snippets from both school newspapers illustrate good examples of civil discourse. This is one series with a lot of juice left in it. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Anything the current National Ambassador for Young People's Literature writes is big business, but this series is quickly becoming his flagship.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)