By Bob Sornson, Maria Dismondy
A new boy shows up swinging, and instead of tattling or looking away, the whole class tells him about a promise they've all made.
Pete is new and he comes in swinging: shoving, name-calling, and at lunch he smacks a juice box out of another child's hands and laughs about it. In most classrooms that's the start of a long, rough year. This class has a plan for it. They've made a promise to each other: when someone gets treated badly, you say something, and you don't just stand there watching. So nobody runs to the teacher and nobody piles on Pete. They tell him what the promise is and they hold him to it. And it turns out Pete has been on the receiving end of all this before, back at his old school, where not one person said a word.
The child this is really written for is the bystander: not the one being bullied, but the one standing right there while it happens, which is where a lot of children find themselves. It's openly a lesson book and doesn't pretend otherwise, so don't expect much subtlety. What it does hand your child is a script — actual sentences a six-year-old can say out loud when someone is being cruel — and that's worth a great deal when your knees are shaking and nothing comes to mind. It also won't let Pete be a plain villain. The mean one has a reason, and your child gets to see it before they've decided who he is.