The Superteacher Project. Gordon Korman. 2023. 304 pages. [Source: Library]
First sentence: Consider the spitball. Not the baseball kind. That's something different. I mean the school kind.
Premise/plot: It's the start of a new school year. Mr. Aidact is a new teacher at Brightling Middle School. He has a "student teacher" named Mr. Perkins (who is a LOT older). As the weeks go by, students and staff come to rely on Mr. Aidact. The teachers love how willing he is to do anything and everything he's asked. Take on detention duties? extra lunchroom or recess duties? become a coach for a field hockey team? There's nothing he won't do to please. But as the weeks turn to months, well, things go from smooth to rough. Will he last his first year of teaching?
My thoughts: I don't know WHY the jacket flap insists on spoiling this one. One pro for spoiling this one ahead of time is that the premise might just be enough to pull readers in. It is a fun premise, no doubt, as to WHO Mr. Aidact *really* is. (Or what). But some readers don't like the plot spelled out for them right on the jacket flap. (I'm "some reader.") The reader will know more than the characters in the story start to almost finish.
I would like this one more if there weren't eight hundred narrators. Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. There's probably only a dozen. Still, I would rather alternate between three or four narratives [if I can't have just one narrator], than alternate between a dozen [give or take a few]. The narrators mostly blend together--mostly.
This one reads like a sitcom. In fact, it reads like a sitcom from the 80s. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a pilot made with this premise.
© 2023 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews
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