The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell. Jordan Sonnenblick. 2021. [February] 224 pages. [Source: Library]
First sentence: The luckiest boy in my class is this kid Kenneth. Last March, when we
were in third grade, there was a massive fire in his apartment building.
He had to jump from his bedroom window on the seventh floor onto one of
those fire-department trampoline things. He almost died! When he came
back to school, he had the best Show and Tell in history. Now he is a
legend.
Premise/plot: The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell is a memoir by author Jordan Sonnenblick. It focuses on his fourth grade year, I believe. The book is packed with adventures and misadventures at home and school. On the one hand, life is GREAT because he's got a SNAKE and he's taking drum lessons. On the other hand, life is AWFUL because his teacher hates him and is always picking on him.
My thoughts: I really enjoyed this one so much. The narrative voice is everything. The narrative is just right. I found it super relatable--even though I don't love snakes or play the drum.
Favorite quotes:
I wanted to say hi to the drummer, and maybe ask him how he had started playing. But I was too shy. So I just kind of faded away from the edge of the bandstand until I got back to the tables.
Anyway, I don’t know how I can learn to be that guy from a few lessons. I am only a shrimpy, nervous fourth grader. It seems to me that becoming a drummer isn’t just learning a set of skills. Becoming that guy would be more like a transformation: caterpillar me would have to somehow turn into … not a butterfly, exactly. Something cooler and stronger. Something heroic. Like a lion. Or Robert Falcone, but with drumsticks.
That’s what I want from drum lessons. To become a legend in just thirty minutes a week.
Maybe Mr. Fred Stoll is like Batman or Superman. People in the upstairs world think of him as a mild-mannered, cat-owning husband. But once you are allowed into his DRUM CAVE, you see the truth behind the disguise.
He sits down at a stool next to the drum set and gestures for me to pass him and sit on the stool that is actually set up directly in front of the drums—the stool a real drummer would sit on to play this set!
When I sit down, I am kind of excited and also kind of terrified. I want so badly to be able to sit right here and make amazing, thunderous noise, but I don’t even know how to hold a drumstick. Fortunately, that is the first lesson. Mr. Stoll lays two sticks down on the shallow, wide drum between my legs and says, “Lesson one: Pick those up.” I want to ask him how I am supposed to pick them up, but I feel like this is some kind of test.
Mr. Stoll is Obi-Wan Kenobi, I am Luke Skywalker, and I am supposed to use the Force to lift the sticks.
It’s only the second week of school, and Mrs. Fisher has already noticed that my handwriting is not neat. By not neat, I mean it looks like a dying chicken dragged a pencil across the page because it was stapled to his leg.
And that’s when I print. You should see my cursive.
It doesn’t matter that she’s right. What matters is that she compares me to William Feranek in front of the whole class.
“JORR-dan! This spelling paper is sloppy! I will not accept messy work!” I try to tell her that I spelled every word right, but she doesn’t care. “Nobody cares,” she purrs, “if you’ve spelled the words right if nobody can read them.
The song is called “Drive My Car.” The band is the Beatles.
There is a short guitar introduction. Then Mr. Stoll plays a roll on two of the tom-toms before starting to play an amazing beat. I don’t know how he does it all! One hand is on the snare drum, the other is playing a pair of cymbals called the hi-hats, which open and close if you push your left foot down on a pedal, and his right foot is working the pedal that hits the bass drum. Every time the bass drum thumps, it is like a bright blue shock in the center of my chest. There is also a clanking noise on every beat of the song that lights up the inside of my mind in dark red pulses. I have no idea what that sound is, but it makes me feel wild, like I am about to jump up out of my chair and yell.
Mr. Stoll says, “Now I am going to play the song again, but you are going to keep time.” He hands me a weird blocky metal thing that looks like one of the bells you might see around a cow’s neck in a cartoon, and tells me I am going to hold it in one hand and use my other hand to hit it with a drumstick.
“What is this thing called?” I ask.
“A cowbell,” Mr. Stoll replies. Well, that makes sense. “Did you hear the clanking sound on every beat of the song?”
I nod.
“All you have to do is hit the cowbell along with the clanks, and together you and I will be a percussion section.”
I smile. A percussion section sounds like something a professional musician would be in.
“Ready?” he asks.
I nod, and he puts the needle down onto the beginning of the song again.
“I’ll tell you when,” he says.
I try to hit the cowbell in time with the song, but that is much harder than it sounds. I could hear the cowbell on the record perfectly the first time the song played, but as soon as I start making noise, I drown the recorded cowbell out. When my time starts to drift, Mr. Stoll looks over at me and counts out the rhythm: “One! Two! Three! Four!”
This happens a few times, but Mr. Stoll only smiles and keeps counting.
The third time through the record, Mr. Stoll doesn’t play. He just watches me and counts. I think I am starting to feel the rhythm on my own. It feels like lightning flashing in my brain.
I like it.
We work on my double stroke roll for a while after we are finished with the Beatles, and then comes a moment I know I will remember for the rest of my life. Mr. Stoll carefully takes the album, Yesterday and Today, off the player and carefully puts it into its protective paper sleeve, then slides the sleeve inside the cardboard album cover and hands the whole thing to me.
“The Beatles,” he says. “So good. John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Ringo is the drummer. You can learn a lot from these guys. Take this for the week, and practice hitting your dictionary in time with the different songs. You have a record player at home, right?”
I nod. Really, I don’t exactly have a record player, but Lissa does.
“Just promise me you’ll take care of the album. You know how to hold it by its edges, right?”
I nod again, very enthusiastically. I will treat this album like a precious jewel. I will treat this album like gold. I will treat this album like I treat Hectoria. I won’t even think about hurling it across Lissa’s room like a Frisbee, the way I threw her Saturday Night Fever soundtrack record when she wouldn’t stop calling me names that one time.
“Great,” he says. “I trust you.”
My drum teacher trusts me.
I walk out of there feeling so excited I might explode. I am holding “Drive My Car” in my own two hands. And there are ten more Beatles songs on the record, just waiting for me to discover them.
© 2021 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews
