Rad Reading – December

The Flunking of Joshua T. Bates written by Susan Shreve is an amazing book. The story starts of with Joshua, a kid who is on summer vacation and finds out that he is going to be redoing 3rd grade because he was not great at reading. Mrs. Goodwin, his 3rdgrade teacher is trying to help him get promoted to 4th grade where he should be. Later in the story he starts getting tutoring and starts opening up to Mrs. Goodwin. Through the story, Tommy is bullying Joshua and his friend Andrew because he thinks 4th and 3rd graders shouldn’t hang out. All at the same time, Mrs. Goodwin was dealing with a divorce because of an argument with Mr. Goodwin. Then towards the end he takes the test that would promote him to 4th grade. He had passed! But something was missing with both Mrs. Goodwin and Joshua.

One of my favorite things about this book is that there are multiple events going on at once. For example, while he was redoing third grade he was about to turn ten years old. He was also dealing with teasing from his bully’s Billy and Tommy. The story has good, short sized pages. My favorite character was Joshua because he not only had to deal with redoing third grade but he also was getting teased and had to get tutoring after school every week. Even though he didn’t like it, he still made the effort to get into fourth grade. One of his character traits is he is brave. One quote to prove this is “Perhaps if Tommy Wilhelm hadn’t laughed a loud monkey laugh that went on and on, Joshua wouldn’t have dared to hit a boy one head taller than he was, flanked on either side by three allies built in large solid squares like cement blocks. But Joshua didn’t think.”

One of my favorite quotes in the book was “‘This morning I woke up, I was homesick,’ Joshua said to her. ‘You know, Joshua.’ Mrs. Goodwin said, halving her Mounds bar with him. ‘So was I.’” This was one of my favorite quotes because this is the moment when the realized that they had a connection and were getting along. This was when he was going to forth grade and was going away from Mrs. Goodwin’s tutoring class.