By Lincoln Peirce
The first Big Nate novel: a sixth-grader whose fortune cookie promises greatness, who goes out and sets the school detention record instead.
Nate Wright cracks open a fortune cookie at lunch and reads that today he will surpass all others. He decides this is a prophecy. What follows is one single school day of Nate trying to be great at something, anything, and collecting seven detention slips while he does it, which turns out to be a school record nobody has ever touched. He eats a hundred and forty-eight servings of cafeteria green beans. He tickles a teacher with a feather duster. He draws unflattering comics about Mrs. Godfrey, the social studies teacher he cannot stand, and gets caught with them. Nate narrates all of it himself and never once doubts he's the most interesting person in the building.
This is the Big Nate to hand over first, the novel rather than the comic-strip collections. It's the same engine as Greg Heffley, a boy narrating his own disasters with total confidence, except Nate is warmer and a good deal less mean, and his cartoons are drawn right into the pages instead of sitting beside them. The chapters are short, a drawing turns up every couple of pages, and the whole book covers one day, so nobody loses the thread. Behind it sits a series long enough to keep a hooked child busy for a year.