Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

After a couple of emotionally tiring audiobooks, I decided to go for a palate cleanser, so to speak–Andrew Clements’ Extra Credit.  This was my third venture into his world, and once again I found myself enjoying the book while appreciating both the depth and the simple satisfaction of it.  He tackles real problems, but he does so in a way suited to middle elementary schoolers, and he gives us endings that, while not unrealistic, contain enough feel-good factor to be relaxing.  In Extra Credit, we meet Abby Carson–a girl who loves the outdoors and struggles to do the schoolwork that forces her inside.  When she realizes that she’s about to be held back instead of moving on to junior high, she meets with her teachers to find another way; in addition to completing all of her homework and making Bs on every test and quiz for the rest of the year, she must correspond with an overseas pen pal and display/present her experiences and what she learns.  Because she loves her school’s rock climbing wall and wishes, more than anything, for mountains, she picks a pen pal from Afghanistan.  It is a choice that involves complications from the very beginning, but as those complications evolve into more serious problems, Abby’s extra credit project affects her in unexpected ways.

Extra Credit was thought-provoking in unexpected ways for me; I was expecting it to go in a different direction, but I was not disappointed by where it went instead.  This would be a lovely book to read and discuss in a classroom, but it’s also a book that individual readers ought to enjoy.  Read it, get it for your kiddos, recommend it to a friend, and most of all, tell me what you think!