By Rob Buyea
A whole fifth-grade class, told in seven voices, spends a year with the teacher who changes them, until an accident on the playground puts him in a coma and every child has to face the part they played.
Seven fifth-graders take turns telling the story of one year with Mr. Terupt, the new teacher who makes school feel different, funnier and kinder and more honest than it's ever been. Each child is quietly carrying something: the class clown who can't sit still, the mean girl who turns friends against each other, the brain who needs to be right, the new girl who watches from the edges, the boy no one can reach. Then one snowy afternoon a game goes too far, a hard-packed snowball flies, and Mr. Terupt goes down on the ice and doesn't get up. Suddenly every child in that room has to live with the part they played, and figure out how to make it right.
This one is built for arguing about. The snowball is thrown in fun, it's nobody's plan, and yet a beloved teacher ends up in a coma, so a group of children gets handed the hardest question there is: when something terrible happens and no one meant it, who is to blame? Because seven narrators tell it, your child sees the same year through the eyes of the show-off, the bully, the loner, and the new girl, and slowly understands that everyone in a classroom is fighting a battle you can't see. It rewards a reader who wants to take a story apart and take sides, and it gives a class a full week of real talk.