The Trouble With Rules by Leslie Bulion.

The Truth About Truman School by Dori Hellestad Butler.

Neither of these books is intended to be “anti-school”, but I gave the second one to my eighth grader who thinks she wants to attend the local public high school next year. I am not totally opposed to this idea, but I want her to know what she might be encountering if she goes there. If she still wants to go to public high school after reading The Truth About Truman School, I’ll be surprised. Ms. Butler’s novel features the stories of several key players in a drama that dominates the social and educational life of Truman School, a fictional school somewhere in the Midwestern U.S. It all starts when social outcasts, Zebby and Amr, decide to start a website that will be a news source for everyone at Truman Middle School, where anyone can post anything as long as it’s their own work and it tells the truth about something, or someone, at Truman School.

The hard part at first is getting anyone to visit the website. Then, the even harder part is separating fact from fiction. When someone starts posting really ugly, but true, things about Lilly, one of the most popular girls at school, what can Zebby and Amr do? They said as long as it was true . . . Then, things get uglier and uglier, and it’s difficult to know what’s true and what’s not.

The Trouble With Rules is aimed at a younger audience, and the trouble in this novel is not as serious nor as dark as the trouble at Truman School. Still, the social atmosphere in Room Twenty in the unnamed upper school (grades 4-6?) in Ms. Bulion’s book is not much better than that of Truman Middle School. The unwritten rule in fourth grade is that girls cannot be friends with boys; in fact, girls and boys cannot even sit on the same side of the lunchroom. Nadie has a problem with this rule since her best friend, Nick, happens to be of the male persuasion, but she and Nick have reached a compromise: they pretend to not to be friends in school and meet after school to enjoy the same friendly relationship they’ve always had. But now there’s a new problem: Summer Crawford, the new girl in class. Summer doesn’t know the rules about boys and girls, and she keeps getting Nadie in trouble.

This book is similar to the Truman School book, too, in that Nadie and her friend Nick are deeply involved in editing, doing artwork, and writing for their school newspaper. And part of the trouble they get into involves their journalistic pursuits. The Trouble With Rules, set as it is in an elementary school, feels like a prelude to the poisonously toxic atmosphere and the seriously hurtful events at Truman School. However, as befits a fourth grade story, all’s well that ends well in The Trouble With Rules, and Nadie and Nick and Summer and their classmates learn that even in fourth grade guys and gals can work and play together if they’re willing to defy “the rules.”

Brown Bear Daughter did read The Truth About Truman School, and her take on the book is that the characters are much too stereotypical. The “popular girls” are cruel, exclusive, and selfish, with very few redeeming qualities. The unpopular kids, especially the two victims of bullying who are even lower on the social scale than Zebby and Amr, are total outcasts with no friends and a miserable school existence. The teachers are unsympathetic and oblivious to the cruelty that is a huge part of daily life at Truman School. Brown Bear Daughter thinks that no school is quite that bad. I hate to disillusion her.

I take for granted the easy comraderie that my children share with both boys and girls in our church, which is mostly made up of homeschooling families, and in our homeschool co-op. Yes, there is some normal sexual tension as the children approach high school age, and boys and girls do hang out with children of their own gender more often than not. However, both my thirteen year old girl and my eleven year old boy have friends of the opposite sex, and they’re not embarrassed to be seen talking to their male or female friends or doing things with them. And not that we don’t have issues at times, but the young people in our homeschool co-op would never be as cruel to their peers as the eighth graders in The Truth About Truman School are. The boys and girls in our fifth grade Sunday School class sit at separate tables, their choice, but the boys and girls talk to each other civilly. And they’re not allowed to tease or slander one another. I’m reminded by books like these that it’s not that way everywhere.

By the way, I’d save The Truth About Truman School for middle school/junior high age kids who are dealing with bullying or a toxic social pecking order. The subject matter (physical and verbal bullying, a girl accused of being a “lezzie”) is a little heavy for elementary school unless the child is facing that kind of intense pressure and viciousness at a younger age. The Trouble With Rules, as I said, is milder and more upbeat.

I therefore urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercies, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices that are holy and pleasing to God, for this is the reasonable way for you to worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:1-2

The Girl Who Could Fly by Vctoria Forrester.

Jeremy Cabbage and the Living Museum of Human Oddballs and Quadruped Delights by David Elliott.

Both of these 2008 Cybil-nominated titles explore the themes of nonconformity, of being true to your own gifts and calling, of bravery in the face of a world that wants to squeeze everyone into its autocratic and rigidly “normal” mold. I found both of them to be delightfully eccentric and plain fun to read. No, they’re not “religious fiction”, but both books embody a Christian ethos, whether that’s intentional or not.

In The Girl Who Could Fly, Piper McCloud is the girl, and to the dismay of her parents and the townsfolk, she can. Fly, that is. And since she’s so special, or maybe outlandish and scary, Piper agrees to leave her parents’ farm with Dr. Letitia Hellion to go to a special school for children who, like Piper, have special gifts. (Watch the names in this book; words, especially names, have meanings.) When Piper gets to her new school, however, she learns a lot more than anyone expected. And even though she’s not the most intelligent child in her class or the strongest or the fastest or even the most talented, Piper becomes the leader, and she leads her fellow students to embrace their gifts in spite of a hostile world that tells them that they are freaks.

The Girl Who Could Fly is about giftedness, but the implication is that we are all gifted. We just need to find our gift(s) and practice them no matter what anyone else thinks. Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Jeremy Cabbage is an orphan who finds himself among a group of human oddities called Cloons. Because Jeremy is adrift in an evil empire presided over by the Baron Ignatius Fyodor Maximus von Strompie, III, Jeremy bounces from one dangerous adventure to another in this picaresque novel with a hero whose heart is as good as gold and whose courage is beyond question. The Baron is a rather unintelligent villain, but his stupidity makes him even more heartless and vicious in some ways. He doesn’t think at all before he makes a law to abolish anything that annoys him or distresses his wife, Gertrudina. (The names in this book are suggestive, too.) And cloons (congental clowns) make Gertrudina very unhappy. When the cloons become Jeremy’s adopted family, everyone is in peril, even the Princess Rosie and her maid, Mary.

This book started out a little slow for me, but after about three chapters I was pulled right into the story. And as I began to see the parallels with The Girl Who Could Fly, I became more and more intrigued with the worldview and philosophy expressed in both books. Think on these nuggets of homespun wisdom from these two books:

Polly, Jeremy’s friend: “You can’t measure another person’s suffering, Jeremy. It’s like a private ocean, with its own depths and its own changing shores. It’s useless to say who has the hardest time staying afloat.”

Gertrudina: “Everything must be perfect for the birthday ball. Perfect and new! The trees have to go. They’re old! I’m replacing them with replicas made of the finest plastics in the Metropolis! The flowers, too. Oh, and the grass, of course. The effect will be spectacular!” (NOTE: Such idiocy expresses the opposite of wisdom, of course.)

Jeremy: “Sometimes a person has to choose between what is safe and what is right.”

Piper: “A person wants to believe in folks and trust in things, and when you can’t, life doesn’t seem worth living anymore. That’s exactly how I felt. Like it was hopeless. But the more I got to pondering it, the more I just figured that even if some folks are bad, there’s others who aren’t. So I reckon I won’t give up my flying for anyone ever again.”

Jeremy’s and Piper’s stories are heading to the top of my Cybils list.

Other bloggers review Jeremy Cabbage:

Matt at the Book Club Shelf: “The main concept of the story is great, and works well. There are many ideas here, making this book very complex, and discussion-rich. While I would not put this at the top of my list, I do think it would make a good book club choice for students to help each other decipher.”

Mom, Not Otherwise Specified: “You’ll be hearing a lot more about Jeremy Cabbage in the future; the movie rights were optioned by Fox 2000 long before the book was published. But don’t wait to be introduced to Jeremy and his friends on the big screen. Get to know them now, in depth and on paper – and be prepared to fall in love.”

And still others review The Girl Who Could Fly:

Laurel Snyder: “But now I see where it’s headed, and it’s WEIRD! There a great deal of carefully executed political/social commentary (AWESOME) and the most lovely magical details (a glowing giraffe, cricket who sings opera, snapping rose with teeth) and there’s also quite a well-tooled adventure, with some real suspense. VERY well plotted.”

Halfway through this book, I knew I had to nominate it for a Cybil Award in the Middle Grade Fiction category. So I did.

I absolutely devoured this book. I’ve always been interested in memoirs, based-on-fact stories, biographies, and just plain fiction about people who live on the fringes: people with mental illness, the disabled, children who are neglected or ignored. I like to see how these people see the world, how they approach those who are more “normal” than they are, how they think. Reading about those who are somehow out of the mainstream of what we call normal teaches me something about what it means to be human, and what it means to be made in God’s image.

Window Boy is the story of Sam Davis. In some ways Sam is a typical sixth grader. He’s crazy about basketball. He doesn’t like math so much, but he does quite well at language arts. He wishes he had more friends.

But Sam’s outside is so different from that of the rest of his new sixth grade class that no one can see any of the things that Sam shares in common with the other boys in the class. Sam has cerebral palsy. He was injured by the doctor at birth, and the only parts of his body that work even halfway well are his tongue and his right hand. Sam has never even been to school before. It’s 1968, and not many children who are as severely physically handicapped as Sam are allowed to go to a regular public school.

Sam can talk —a little. And he can use a letter board to communicate and do his school assignments. The question is whether or not his teacher and his new classmates and the PTA and the principal will give him a chance to prove himself, prove that he can learn and go to school just like everyone else. And will his single mother be able to keep their apartment in spite of money problems that are threatening to make Sam’s public school experiment a short one? And will Miss Perkins, Sam’s nurse and interpreter, be able to help him make the transition and make friends? Finally, will Sam be able to live up to the example of his hero, Winston Churchill, who overcame a difficult childhood to become one of the world’s greatest leaders?

I found this book to be both inspiring and absorbing. It probably could have benefitted from some tighter editing; there’s a lot of extraneous material at the end especially which interested me but might not appeal to kids, and sometimes the pace is a little slow. However, I didn’t care. Sam’s story was amazing, and I had to keep reminding myself that this book was a work of fiction, not a biography or a memoir. I wanted to find out where Sam was now; I actually wanted to write him a letter of encouragement and congratulations. I predict that many of the middle schoolers who read this book will try to do just that, not realizing that Sam is a fictional character.

The emphasis on bravery and perseverance and on Sam’s relationship with Winnie (Winston Churchill with whom Sam carries on a rich interior dialog) is moving and will be an encouragement to those children and adults who are facing their own life challenges. I think the book will appeal to the Helen Keller fans, whose numbers are legion, who are looking to step up to a more demanding read. Boys who are interested in sports but unable to play for one reason or another may also identify with Sam’s love of basketball. Kids with CP or other disabilities should read this one or have it read aloud to them. Kids who need to understand the world of disability, and all of us do, should also get a taste of Window Boy. It’s not at all didactic, but highly educational nevertheless.

Andrea White on inspiring young people with fiction: