By Tom Angleberger
A sixth-grader builds a case file to answer one question: is the weird child's finger-puppet actually giving wise advice?
Dwight is the strangest child in sixth grade, he wears the same shirt for a month and sits in a hole he dug at recess, but the origami Yoda finger-puppet on his hand keeps giving out advice that turns out to be right. Tommy needs to know if it's real before he takes its advice on something important, so he collects everybody's stories into a case file: the times Origami Yoda helped, the times it seemed like nonsense, and what to make of the boy behind the puppet. Each classmate tells their own chapter, and Tommy weighs the evidence.
This is a real step up in reading from the picture-packed novels earlier on the trail. The doodles are down to a small drawing in the margin here and there, so the page is mostly text now, but the text is easy: each chapter is a short, self-contained story told in a different classmate's plain voice, so a child gets the momentum of finishing a whole 'case' every few pages. It's the rung where a comics reader is reading prose and barely notices, because the format still feels like flipping through a scrapbook.