By Jocko Willink
A boy who feels like a failure spends a summer with his ex-Navy-SEAL uncle, learning discipline and jiu-jitsu and how to stop being the one who gets pushed around.
Marc is wrapping up fifth grade feeling like he's bad at everything. He can't do a single pull-up, he can't swim, his times tables won't stick, and a classmate named Kenny needles him about all of it. Then his uncle Jake, a Navy SEAL, moves in for the summer, and instead of sympathy he hands Marc a plan: up early, train every day, learn jiu-jitsu, eat better, drill the math until it sticks. By the end of the summer Marc can swim, he's earned his pull-ups, and he walks back into school steadier, sure enough of himself that Kenny's jabs stop landing. Marc tells the whole thing himself, in short chapters with a lot of illustrations, so for a novel it reads fast.
This is the oldest-feeling book on the shelf, and it comes with a real point of view. Jocko Willink is a former Navy SEAL, and the philosophy is his: discipline, hard training, early mornings, doing the thing you don't feel like doing. A lot of families love it for exactly that, and a child who's itching to feel capable tends to tear through it. Just know going in that the message is deliberate and has a military flavor, so you can decide whether that's what you want. What it does well is show a boy who isn't naturally good at anything get good the ordinary way, by working at it every day.