Kassie, Girl Genius Book 1: Student

Kassie is seven-years-old and brilliant. But, her life isn’t easy despite a loving family. Kasie has no friends, because no child close to her age will befriend a genius. Kassie hates school and survives only by ignoring her teacher and reading classic literature and junior high school textbooks. Students her age take a standard IQ test—Kassie completes it with no mistakes. Kassie does the same on a tougher test, and her IQ is recorded as greater than 190. This super-genius score gets Kassie a scholarship to the Academy of the Mind in Omaha, a boarding school far from her home in Ithaca, New York. Kassie will miss her family, but she looks forward to being among sixty-three other geniuses. She expects a great learning environment with formal and informal sharing of knowledge among well-behaved schoolmates who know that the Golden Rule gives the best outcome for social interactions.

Kassie doesn’t mind rooming with a nine-year-old boy because she shared a room with her brother. She also doesn’t mind the coed bathrooms with a nudity allowed policy. However, only two nine-year-old boys in the other dorm are nude in the bathroom. Kassie could be a nudist, but she shows only brief glimpses of the side of her body while she dries off after showering. Kassie doesn’t understand why such a boring display results in spying by numerous nine- to eleven-year-old boys. She takes action to minimize the spying, but the action backfires and causes worse problems.

By her third day, Kassie has learned that most of her schoolmates don’t follow the Golden Rule—rudeness and insults are common. Most students have live interactions with only a handful of friends in the dining hall. Most students sit in front of their computers all day for learning and interactive gaming.

Kassie announces that the Academy is sick, and she assigns herself the role of doctor. She organizes clubs and fun activities to drag schoolmates away from their computers. She advocates discussion groups and lectures by schoolmates. Her actions improve the Academy, but she makes enemies among students who don’t want to leave their dorm room workstations.

Kassie confronts a very different problem in her second semester. Her friend Burt lies comatose after an auto accident, and Kassie struggles with hospital bureaucracies because she wants to spend three hours a day helping her friend. She knows that reading to Burt, playing his favorite music, having him smell foods that he likes, and touching him might pull him out of his coma. No one else will do this, and Kassie struggles to be with Burt. Burt wakes and slowly recovers. He gives a presentation on traumatic brain injury and states that Kassie’s efforts kept him from remaining comatose and being warehoused for life. This public praise does not have the positive effect for Kassie that Burt expects.

Kassie finishes the school year wiser and happier. She went from no friends to many, and she values that more than her learning and her academic achievements. She’s excited about living with her nearly perfect family instead of interacting only via Skype. But, in ten weeks, the Academy physician will return.