Amazon.com Review
Fifth-grader Jack Rankin's father is the janitor of the junior-high school. That wouldn't be so bad if nobody knew about it. But on October 5, disaster strikes when Lenny Trumbull throws up his cafeteria ravioli: Jack's dad appears on the scene with a mop and says, "Hi, son." Jack loves his father and is proud of him, but he knows a giant letter
L for
loser has just been branded on his forehead. To make matters worse, Jack, furious when the inevitable stream of ridicule begins, blindly crashes into his bucket-bearing dad in the hallway, unleashing laughter, clapping, and plenty of water all around. Jack's anger is now a firestorm, and as author Andrew Clements so vividly phrases it: "The sizzling chunks of Jack's burning rage stuck to his father--like gobs of well-chewed watermelon bubble gum."
Jack's fury manifests itself into the perfect crime--a carefully premeditated, 13-piece Bubblicious attack on an innocent music-room chair that results in a sticky, gooey, smelly web that only a janitor would have the skills to remove. The "sweet smell of victory" diffuses quickly, however, when Jack is condemned to after-school gum-removal duty for the next three weeks. Stickier still is how this is going to play out at home with his mom and dad.
The after-school hours Jack spends scraping gum off furniture prove to be eye-opening. He develops a scholarly interest in gum excavation, and has plenty of time to make a list of ways he is not like his dad the janitor. But one day--first in a forgotten underground tunnel and then on a long truck-ride home--he discovers that there is more to his good-hearted, strong, unassuming father than he had ever even thought to imagine. Clements, a former public-school teacher and author of the bestselling Frindle and The Landry News, has a knack for getting to the heart of things while keeping the story buoyant. Readers of all ages will think twice about what kind of people (outside of their parental or occupational roles) their own parents might be. (Ages 8 to 12) --Karin Snelson
From Publishers Weekly
As he did in Frindle and The Landry News, Clements here puts an intelligent and credible fifth-grader at the center of a memorable novel. As the book opens, Jack, after much careful planning, is executing the "perfect crime": he assembles the biggest, stickiest wad of gum imaginable and affixes it to the desk in the back row of the music room. Why? The novel then flashes back to the moment when Jack's father, John, the head janitor, comes into his classroom to clean up vomit and calls Jack "son." At that point, "Jack felt like a giant letter had been branded on his forehead--L, for Loser." When Jack gets caught and the vice principal assigns him to three weeks' duty of scraping gum from school property after school, Jack decides, "There was only one person to blame for the whole mess.... Thanks again, Dad." Clements slowly builds an even, affecting narrative to reveal how Jack comes to better know and appreciate John, effectively drawing a parallel between this father-son relationship and John's relationship with his own father. The author adds a mystery to the mix when the boy discovers keys in the janitor's closet, which unlock literal doors to his understanding of his father. The author's uncanny ability to capture the fragile transformation from child to adolescent and its impact on family relationships informs every aspect of the novel. Ages 8-12. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
