By John David Anderson
Three sixth-grade boys skip school to give their teacher, who is dying of cancer, the perfect last day.
Ms. Bixby is the teacher who makes a hard year bearable — the one who notices the child everyone else has given up on. When she's diagnosed with cancer and has to leave before the school year is out, Topher, Steve, and Brand decide a cupcake goodbye in the classroom won't do. They skip school, pool the money they have, and set off across town to give her the last day they'd been planning: her favorite foods, one very specific cheesecake, an afternoon that's just hers. The book is told in the three boys' alternating voices, and the day goes both wonderfully and completely off the rails. Each of them is also carrying a private reason for needing her to know what she meant to him.
This is the big one on the trail, and the book earns it. It keeps everything a Wimpy Kid reader loves — funny boy narrators, a plan that goes sideways, real friendship — but pours it into a story about losing someone who mattered. For an older child ready to feel something real from a book, this is the one that shows what those funny voices can do when the stakes are as high as they get. I read the last chapters with a lump in my throat, and it's still genuinely funny most of the way there.