The Misfits

Title: The Misfits

Author: James Howe

Grade Level: Middle School

Rating: 5

Summary: This book is more or less about a group of outsiders who come together and are all best friends.  They are probably four of the most picked on kids in school and when it comes time for their class elections, they want a change.  Addie, Skeezie, Joe, and Bobby create their own third party on the platform of stopping name calling.  Little did they know, what they were about to do was actually going to change things.

Opinion: I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to like this book at first, especially after they started chapter three with almost a whole chapter of just dialogue that Addie was recording during one of their meetings.  Throughout the book my opinion started to flip the other way and I became very interested in what was going to happen next.  I think that in this book James Howe does such an amazing job of writing a story the middle school aged children can really relate to.  I don’t think that there was one thing in this book that I thought was too farfetched and could never happen to a middle school student.  I think that it helped a lot that Bobby was narrating the whole book because it makes you feel for everything that bobby is going through.  I couldn’t help but think about what was going to happen next to Bobby, even though the rest of the characters were important.  Also, as the book progressed it was really interesting to see the difference in how some of these characters were portrayed in the beginning of the book and how they actually were.  Skeezie is a perfect example of this.  They portray him as a complete dirtball in the beginning of the book, how is made to sound like a kid who just doesn’t care about anyone.  When we really look at Skeezie the person, however, we see how caring he actually is.  It becomes very clear that to Skeezie it doesn’t matter that Bobby is overweight, or Addie is a loud mouth, and it doesn’t even matter that Joe is gay; Skeezie likes his friend because of who THEY are.  Overall I just thought that this book did a great job of keeping my attention and making me wonder “what next!?”

Connection:  I wholeheartedly believe that this book would be really good in any 5-8^th grade classroom.  The whole topic of name calling is present everywhere in school, but it seems to me like the middle school age starting around fifth grade is where it really starts picking up.  I believe that this book could actually have a lasting impact on a student around this age because it shows them that: a. it does hurt the people that are being made fun of, and b. there is something that can be done to put a stop to name calling.  It would even be cool to take the idea of no name calling day/week and trying to implement it into your own classroom as part of an experiment to see if your students really understood the point of this story.