Andrew Clements - Reviews

Frindle

Andrew Clements
Aladdin
Fiction, CH General Fiction
Themes: Schools
****

Description

Nick Allen doesn't mean to be a troublemaker; he just gets big ideas and has to try them out. One time, he turned his classroom into a tropical island... which was great fun until the janitor complained about the sand in the hallway. Then there was the year he learned about the blackbirds and the hawks, how they made a high warning noise the hawk couldn't pin down - a noise teachers, apparently, also couldn't pin down. But in fifth grade, Nick's supposed to be growing up and getting ready for middle school.
Then he meets Mrs. Granger, a language arts teacher with a will as strong as his own, and Nick comes up with his greatest idea ever. An assignment to understand the origins of words leads Nick to invent his own word: "frindle," instead of "pen." He even recruits a few friends to help spread his word. It started as a way to tweak Mrs. Granger. But the game quickly becomes much larger than Nick anticipated, involving not just him and his teacher but the whole class, the whole school... maybe the whole nation.

Review

How do words become words - and how do new words appear? This quick-reading story tracks the growth of a new word, as Nick pits the contradictory ideas he's been given - that the dictionary holds all the words in the English language, and that words only have meaning because everyone agrees they have meaning - against each other, and against the one teacher who has outsmarted his tricks. Nick really isn't a troublemaker, at least not a malicious one, but one of those clever kids who finds school boring, one who learned early on how to manipulate teachers because it was more challenging than the lessons, one bold enough to turn classes into real-world laboratories for his big ideas. He's the kind of kid who can do great things if he's not stomped down by conformist authorities, as they try to stomp Nick down here... the way they too often are stomped down in real life. It becomes not so much about the word itself but about a battle of wills between student and teacher, between innovation and tradition. Both end up growing and learning, in a story that's simple on the outside but has some interesting ideas and themes lurking beneath the surface.

Things Not Seen

The Things Not Seen series, Book 1
Andrew Clements
Puffin
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
Themes: Altered DNA
*****

Description

Fifteen-year-old Bobby is a typical teen, until the morning he wakes up to discover he’s invisible. It’s not just that his parents don’t notice him, though as a college professor and top physicist they sometimes get preoccupied with their work. He’s really invisible, as in he can’t see his own face in the mirror. Suddenly, Bobby finds himself a ghost in his own home, as he can’t go to the school or even the library without a visible body. He can’t even talk to his friends or see a doctor, for fear that the wrong people could take an interest in his unusual case. While his mother worries and his father tries to determine what happened (with little success, but lots of theories), Bobby begins to explore life as the ultimate hidden observer. But a child just can’t vanish for weeks on end without someone getting suspicious; unless Bobby wants to see his family carted off to jail, he’s going to have to figure out what caused his invisibility - and if it can be reversed.

Review

A fast, good read that creates surprisingly believable characters, Things Not Seen is less about why a boy could become invisible and more about how people deal with a seemingly impossible phenomenon. It goes without saying that Bobby has to do some growing up along the way, especially when he meets the blind girl Alicia and learns that not only is he not alone in being alone, but that even his slim chance of restoration to “normal” is more than many people have. I loved it, and stayed up well past midnight to finish reading.