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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Room One: A Mystery or Two, September 11, 2007
So it's time for silent reading in my fifth grade class and my students LOVE silent reading time. Most of them can't get enough of the books they're reading and can't wait to talk about them. But there's always the few who spend the entire silent reading time in the school library or at my personal library or trying to sneak away to the bathroom. They spend more time fidgeting than they do reading. How do you get those children to read? Well, one thing I have found that works is to put an Andrew Clements book in their hands.
Clements' books are simple and readable and according to most of my fifth graders, cool. Frindle, The Landry News, and Lunch Money are not filled with elementary student clichés. The characters aren't cheesy and my students don't find themselves saying "Come on, we're not like that" as is the case with many other books written for them. Clements' characters act and talk like real elementary students and are usually faced with real problems and this is an important part of his appeal. Room One is no exception.
One day while sixth grader Ted Hammond is delivering papers, he notices a mysterious face in an upstairs window of an old home, the Anderson's home. What spikes Ted's curiosity is that no one has lived in the Anderson house for two years. The house has sat empty and the windows have been boarded up. With nothing else going on in his small rural Nebraska town of Plattsford, Ted sets out to investigate.
I liked this book. I really did. It doesn't matter that I picked it up half-wanting, half-expecting a good mystery and didn't get one. Clements made me care about Ted, and April, and her family, and Mrs. Mitchell to the point where it didn't matter if the "mystery" to this story was solved for the reader less than halfway through the book. It's still a good story, and in the end, that's what children really want to read.
A few things I thoroughly enjoyed about the book . . . The Red Prairie Learning Center was fascinating to read about. The idea of a town, so against consolidating with surrounding communities that they've forced themselves to become what they have (a one room school with four 4th graders, one 6th grader, and four 8th graders) was an extremely interesting setting. I loved Mrs. Mitchell's character. She has many wonderful traits that only a teacher would be able to recognize. It didn't surprise me one bit to discover that Clements himself was a teacher at one point in time. No stereotypes here.
As long as you don't set your expectations too high, you'll find Room One a quick, easy, and entertaining read. The epilogue fills in the rest of the story nicely and provides adequate closure to the story surrounding April and her family. Having read most of Clements' other stories, seeing "A Mystery or Two" across this cover excited me some at the thought of a departure from his normal work, but please don't make the same mistake. This isn't so much a mystery as it is another fun (but somewhat serious), school story from Andrew Clements. And that's just fine by me.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Satisfying mystery, February 22, 2007
Ted Hammond is one of only nine students in his one room school and the only 6th grader in Plattsford, Nebraska. The farming community is shrinking and the school is going to close because of the small enrollment. The loss of the school will be the final blow to the town.
Ted loves to read mysteries and the town librarian Mrs. Coughlin has introduced him to interlibrary loan. He reads 2-3 mysteries a week and excels at solving them before the last chapter.
One morning while delivering newspapers he think he sees a face in the window of an abandoned farmhouse on his route. Using the detective skills he has learned, Ted sets out to solve the mystery. While assembling clues, he discovers a family camping in the old house. Alexa a girl about his age asks him to keep her family's presence in the house a secret. He reluctantly agrees then devotes himself to their welfare by bringing them food.
Clements always writes with amazing candor and feeling about the adults in children's lives. He is clear eyed about the sometimes edgy relationship between teachers and their students. Ted confides in his teacher, Mrs. Mitchell about the family which puts her into an ethical dilemma. She does not want to break a promise to a student but she knows she must report the family.
This low key 162 page story is rounded out by an epilogue that tells "the rest of the story" in a conclusion that is very satisfying for the family and Ted's town.
There is much about Andrew Clements that impresses me. His website quotes him, "It is a privilege to write for children."
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Room One, August 6, 2008
Longtime Clements reader and I have to say, this book is just horrible. It's completely lacking all of the charm we have come to know and love from all of his other books, and I don't understand where that disappeared to. Before you say, well, maybe you're just too old for the books now, I'd just like to say that I still read Frindle and the School Story and others, and they're still as good as when I first read them, if not better.
There's almost no character interaction or character development. It's simply boring.
The cultural references also threw me off, they're supposed to be timeless stories, not stories with iPods and Gameboys and wars in Iraq. They should be happening to anyone, anywhere.
I just didn't like the tone. It's nothing like his old works. If you're a fan of the classic Clements books, I strongly recommend you spare yourself a few minutes and pick another Andrew Clements book to read, cause this one's just not worth it.
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