Five Times Revenge

April 1, 2016
Five middle school students come together to orchestrate the downfall of a school bully. Adam Baker, a white eighth-grader at Anderson Middle School, is tired of being bullied by Principal Parmer's son, Hill, the kind of smarmy kid who is late for school every morning, bullies half of the kids in school, cheats on every test, and copies homework. The kid who tapes "kick me" signs on classmates, throws kids against lockers, and dumps milk on people's lunch trays. Adam finds four students who have been victims of Hill's abuse to join him in concocting a plan to bring Hill down. What might have been another not-so-funny middle school melodrama of pranks and social meanness becomes a heartwarming tale of necessary revenge exacted through an ingenious scheme. The five co-conspirators--all victims, all reluctant outsiders in the school's social cosmos--come together and find friendship and a sense of belonging with one another. The five new friends' stories are told in short, alternating chapters, each related as a tightly focused third-person narrative. The kids emerge as fully rounded characters; of particular note are biracial black/white Pearl, who has a list of microaggressions as long as her arm, and detention-magnet Dutch, who has a facial tic and lives with his grandfather. This big, fast-moving tale of students who unite to take a stand against bullies and find friendship in the process is a keeper. (Fiction. 8-14)

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May 1, 2016

Gr 4-8-Five eighth-grade students plot and pull off an audacious revenge plot against the two biggest bullies at their school: classmate Hill Parmar and his father, the school's racist, embezzling principal. The story proceeds from a vicious bullying incident, in which Hill "persuaded [a protagonist's developmentally disabled brother] Tommy to play hide-and-seek after school, then locked him up in a utility room, with a sign that said 'Kick me, I'm retarded.' " While everyone involved has suffered some degree of bullying at the hands of Hill Parmar and his father, this incident proves a bridge too far. Rather than offering intricate plotting, this upper-middle grade novel focuses on the five protagonists' growth and development. How these characters come together to confront bullying and end up better understanding themselves and one another is what will pull tween readers in and keep them engaged when this fairly lengthy story's pace flags on occasion. Eland creates a cast of relatively fleshed-out, largely empathetic protagonists to whom a wide range of readers will be able to relate, with laudable attention paid to the microaggressions dealt with by the story's biracial violin prodigy.

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