How to Get Suspended and Influence People [Library Binding]

Adam Selzer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 13, 2007

It all starts with an assignment. Leon's "gifted and talented" class has to make educational videos for the sixth and seventh graders. Leon originally chooses "sex ed" as his subject in the hopes of showing a flash of boob. But as time goes on, his project starts to mean something. He wants to tell the younger kids that puberty is tough, but what they're going through is normal.

After researching the avant-garde movement, Leon crafts his video in the style of Fellini: La Dolce Pubert. It's deeply disturbing yet comforting.

But when the gifted program's director sees it, she suspends Leon—and he finds himself at the center of a townwide debate over censorship. Who gets to decide how far is too far?


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 6–8—Thirteen-year-old Leon Noside (Edison spelled backwards) Harris has spent a lifetime hating the middle name his father gave him as an insult to Thomas Edison. Smart-mouthed and gifted, he uses his creative resources—a talent he inherited from parents who spend hours concocting their own inventions whether in the garage or the kitchen—to make an avant-garde sex-education video that tells kids that masturbation is normal. Leon is suspended, and the students stage a near riot, complete with "Free Leon Harris" signs. This isn't the first time that Mrs. Smollet, the program director for the gifted pool, has had negative encounters with her students, but it is the first time that Leon is a hero at school. The administration is challenged to sort out the real problem: Is it Leon, or Mrs. Smollet? This funny, fast-paced novel is filled with characters who epitomize the middle school experience, and it presents a lesson or two about free speech as well.—Pat Scales, formerly at South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities, Greenville
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Selzer's zany, edgy debut thumbs its nose at censorship and prudishness as its eighth-grade hero tries to make a "frank, honest, and artistic sex-ed video" for a peer-education project. Leon wants to avoid rehashing the staid diagrams and dramatizations typical of the genre. Inspired by his worldly friend and crush, Anna, who introduces him to avant-garde cinema, he creates a nonsensical pastiche of Great Masters nudes, symbolic images, and narrated sonnets about body changes and "whacking off." His creative triumph, followed by his suspension and the ensuing uproar, unfolds in a comic, first-person narrative, laden with sarcasm, occasional cussing ("bullshit"), and mostly abstract references to sex. Characters are over-the-top in this slapstick parable, and it all comes to a pointed end (lots of people see and admire the film, and a teacher with a religious agenda is ousted). Still, many creative young readers--perhaps especially those who, like Leon, identify with "miscreant kids who just happen to read books from the adult section in the library"--will appreciate the plot's outrageousness and applaud Leon's commitment to his quirky vision. Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 12 and up
  
• Library Binding: 192 pages
• Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers (February 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385903847
• ISBN-13: 978-0385903844
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,578,685 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Adam Selzer is the proud coiner of the immortal phrase "you don't have to be smart to be a smartass, but it helps." He writes humorous books (both fiction and non) for readers of all ages by day and runs ghost tours in Chicago by night. If you can find two cooler jobs than that, take 'em! He is one of those people you hear about on the news who has to choose between paying off student loans and having a health care plan, and occasionally claims to be the third cowboy from the left in the famous "lost thunderbird photo." He is also credited by film historians as having inspired the film "Bedtime for Bonzo," which starred Ronald Reagan and a chimp. People who point out that said movie was released decades before he was born just don't know enough about quantum physics. Adam enjoys standing in long lines for tickets, and hopes to one day travel back in time to wait in line overnight for tickets to see a Charles Dickens reading. See him online at http://www.adamselzer.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remember Junior High?, February 19, 2007

By 

David Johnston (Cumming, GA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: How to Get Suspended and Influence People (Hardcover)

Adam Selzer clearly remembers what it's like to be in the "gifted" class in middle school -- and an outsider. The hero of "How to Get Suspended and Influence People," Leon Noside Harris, reminds the reader of the gifted kids they knew in their junior high days: smart-alecky, disheveled, ahead of their age, and out-of-step with the cool kids. And that's the way they liked it. These are the kids you used to describe by saying, "He's either going to be a great success or end up in jail."

Leon is supported at school by a gaggle of like-minded friends, and by teachers who want to lift him up and slap him down. At home, Leon's lovingly dysfunctional family will remind you of Bill Bryson's parents in "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" (Selzer and Bryson both grew up in Des Moines, albeit 30 years apart -- was there something in the water there?).

Young readers will relate to Leon's efforts to "fight the power" and make La Dolce Pubert. Adults will laugh as they remember their junior high days -- or the junior high days they wish they had.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great read, November 26, 2007

By 

Cindy - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Get Suspended and Influence People (Hardcover)

I read this book last March, but since 2007 is almost over, I can honestly say that of the hundreds of books I've read all year, this was one of the most enjoyable. As a past member of the gifted pool, I had many a flashback to all the crazy stunts that inevitably seep out when a bunch of intelligent smartasses get together. Leon is so engaging and worth rooting for, and Selzer's writing is just plain hilarious. It's refreshing to find a writer who doesn't feel the need to condescend to young readers. I can't wait for Pirates of the Retail Wasteland.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quirky and Awesome, June 18, 2007

By 

D. Abel (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Get Suspended and Influence People (Hardcover)

Eighth-grader Leon Harris takes on an assignment to create an "educational" video and decides to make it artsy and avant-garde in order to spread the message that what pubescent kids are feeling is normal. And that goes double about masturbating. He thinks it'll change the world. One of his teachers thinks he's a Satan-worshipping immoral miscreant who should be expelled and thrown in jail. Suddenly the entire student body rallies around Leon and it becomes an issue of free speech and artsy subversion vs. what should and shouldn't be taught in public schools. It's hilarious and, if not totally realistic, at least very human.

I harbor perverse love for misfit adolescent main characters - adolescent either physically (Stephen Chbosky, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower) or emotionally (Mark Spitz, How Soon Is Never?) - and Leon is immature, smartassy and sassy, bless him, and they need to make more kids like him.