By Rachel Renée Russell
A comic-book-obsessed seventh grader gets shut in his locker after everyone's gone home, finds a way out through the air ducts, and lands right over a robbery in progress.
Max Crumbly spent seven years homeschooled, and he walks into South Ridge Middle School on day one fully expecting to become a superhero. What he becomes instead is the favorite target of Doug Thurston, Thug to everyone, whose idea of fun is folding Max into his locker. Max records all of it in his journal. Then one afternoon, sealed in that locker after the halls have emptied, he leans back and the rear panel pops loose. He crawls out into the air ducts above the school and finds himself directly over three burglars hauling off the new computers. Max has never done a brave thing in his life. Now he has to decide if he's about to start.
This is the same handwritten-journal-with-doodles format that made Dork Diaries fly off shelves, from the same author, so if that's where your child already lives, the leap here is basically nothing. What's different is the flavor. Max isn't navigating middle-school social politics; he's a superhero fanboy narrating his own clumsy origin story, cross-cut with a break-in he stumbles straight into. The comedy comes from how seriously he takes himself while everything falls apart around him. The margins are crowded with his sketches, the chapters are short, and the whole thing moves like an action-comedy that happens to be written as a diary.