By Janet Tashjian
A boy who'd rather do anything than read narrates his own summer, doodling a stick figure in the margin for every word too big to bother defining.
Derek Fallon would rather do almost anything than read, so naturally he's the one stuck narrating a whole book. Every time a vocabulary word he can't be bothered to define shows up, he draws a little stick figure of it in the margin instead. His summer of freedom gets hijacked by 'Learning Camp' and a runaway pet, and then he finds a faded newspaper photo in the attic: a teenage girl at a beach, and his parents go quiet the moment he asks about her.
If you've got a child who'd rather do anything than open a book, Derek is one of them, and he clearly can't believe he got stuck narrating this one. The margin doodles do the vocabulary work without a whiff of school: a big word turns up, and there's a little drawing of it instead of a definition. Underneath the jokes there's a real mystery, so a child who's been living on comics gets some practice holding a longer thread across a whole book. It's a solid bridge from the doodle books toward reading a genuine chapter book.