Schooled
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- ¥1,400
発行者による作品情報
A “insightful and absorbing” (Shelf Awareness, starred review) novel from acclaimed author Jamie Sumner about new schools, unexpected friendships, and overcoming loss.
Eleven-year-old Lenny Syms is about to start college—sort of. As part of a brand-new experimental school, Lenny and four other students are starting sixth grade on a university campus, where they’ll be taught by the most brilliant professors and given every resource imaginable. This new school is pretty weird, though. Instead of hunkering down behind a desk to study math, science, and history, Lenny finds himself meditating, participating in discussions where you don’t even have to raise your hand, and spying on the campus population in the name of anthropology.
But Lenny just lost his mom, and his Latin professor dad is better with dead languages than actual human beings. Lenny doesn’t want to be part of some learning experiment. He just wants to be left alone. Yet if Lenny is going to make it as a middle schooler on a college campus, he’s going to need help. Is a group of misfit sixth graders and one particularly quirky professor enough to pull him out of his sadness and back into the world?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grieving the death of his free-spirited mother six months ago, Lenny Syms is not thrilled about living in college dorm housing with his emotionally distant Latin professor father. Lenny is even less excited to begin sixth grade at the Copernican School, an experimental on-campus program. Classes are taught by the professor parents of Lenny's four classmates, and the structure is a mix of "self-care and group actualization," independent study, and college class auditing, culminating in each middle schooler presenting a semester-long, self-directed project. Lenny elects to ignore most of the school's requirements by engaging in "perfectly natural father-son rebellion," born of Lenny's simmering resentment over his dad's withdrawal from parenting and refusal to talk about his mother. He does, however, sporadically attend a class on fairy tales taught by a charismatic elderly professor. But as the school year progresses, Lenny grows closer to his classmates, who support one another throughout various parental conflicts. Utilizing the school's collegiate setting and the unique freedom and autonomy it affords the child protagonists, Sumner (Please Pay Attention) skillfully depicts standard coming-of-age themes like finding community and navigating grief with fresh humor and vitality. Lenny and his father cue as white. Ages 10–up.
