For anyone who has ever felt like a potato in middle school, this hilarious story about a boy forced to become the dorkiest school mascot ever will have readers cheering!
“A grade A, spudtastic (not to mention FUNNY) debut. Arianne Costner sure knows middle school and middle schoolers!” –Chris Grabenstein, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library
Ben Hardy believes he’s cursed by potatoes. And now he’s moved to Idaho, where the school’s mascot is Steve the Spud! Yeah, this cannot be good.
After accidentally causing the mascot to sprain an ankle, Ben is sentenced to Spud duty for the final basketball games of the year. But if the other kids know he’s the Spud, his plans for popularity are likely to be a big dud! Ben doesn’t want to let the team down, so he lies to his friends to keep it a secret. No one will know it’s him under the potato suit . . . right?
Life as a potato is all about not getting mashed! With laugh-out-loud illustrations throughout, hand to fans of James Patterson, Gordan Korman, Jeff Kinney, and Chris Grabenstein!
“A hilarious, relatable story for any kid who has ever felt out of place.” –Stacy McAnulty, author of The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl.
My Review
This book is full of all the right kinds of silliness. Ben fumbles his way through one hilarious disaster and right into another, always thinking he can fix it all by himself. He’s a hard worker– and even when he’s punished by being forced to serve as the school mascot, he tries his best to do it well. I loved the ways he challenges himself– to learn more about mascots, to examine his behavior toward a kid who seems to be a bit of an outcast.
He doesn’t do it all the right way, but he has a good heart, and that makes him so easy to love. His relationships with his family members were sweet, and his friendships felt very much like those ports of safety we all needed in middle school.
MY LIFE AS A POTATO is a super fun read. It does show Ben transitioning toward dating and having relationships, so it might be best suited to readers who are thinking about those transitions themselves. It has a lot of humor and friendship issues in it, too, which make it a great story for upper elementary school readers.
Content Notes
Recommended for Ages 8 to 12.
Representation Ben’s friend Ellie is Latina.
Profanity/Crude Language Content None.
Romance/Sexual Content Brief kissing between boy and girl.
Spiritual Content None.
Violent Content One boy accidentally trips another with a hot dog. A boy knocks some girls over accidentally. One boy plans pranks against another boy. Kids get into a food fight.
Drug Content None.
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About Tess of the Road
In the medieval kingdom of Goredd, women are expected to be ladies, men are their protectors, and dragons get to be whomever they want. Tess, stubbornly, is a troublemaker. You can’t make a scene at your sister’s wedding and break a relative’s nose with one punch (no matter how pompous he is) and not suffer the consequences. As her family plans to send her to a nunnery, Tess yanks on her boots and sets out on a journey across the Southlands, alone and pretending to be a boy.
Where Tess is headed is a mystery, even to her. So when she runs into an old friend, it’s a stroke of luck. This friend is a quigutl–a subspecies of dragon–who gives her both a purpose and protection on the road. But Tess is guarding a troubling secret. Her tumultuous past is a heavy burden to carry, and the memories she’s tried to forget threaten to expose her to the world in more ways than one.
My Review Since I enjoyed the books about Seraphina, Tess’s half-sister, I looked forward to revisiting the story world in Tess of the Road. I still enjoyed the complex and intricate setting with its cultural and spiritual elements. It took me a while to get into Tess’s character. At the beginning of the story, she’s bitter at the world and desperately trying to drown her sorrows and her self-pity in wine or spirits. At first I felt like she was self-focused and self-pitying. As the scenes revealed her backstory, I felt more sympathy for her.
Tess’s journey gave the story a bit more structure. I didn’t find her goal super compelling because it was really about helping her friend Pathka reach a goal he had set, and she still seemed to be floundering as far as her own goals and needs. The most dominant force in the story remained the politics of equality (or really, lack of it) in Tess’s world. Sometimes the narrative felt preachy and forced.
Once Tess began her interior journey of healing from past trauma, I began to like her a lot more. I liked her journey companion, Pathka, too. Overall, it might be cathartic for someone who has endured some past sexual trauma to make this journey with Tess toward healing and recovery. See below for content information, though. Tess of the Road contains some strong sexual content.
Recommended for Ages 16 up.
Cultural Elements
I don’t remember race descriptions of the characters. Tess’s cousin is gay. She meets another gay man on a job she works. She also meets a traveling prostitute who tells Tess she services both men and women.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
Mild profanity used infrequently. More often there are made up curses related to the saints in the story. My favorite is, “St. Daan in a pan!”
Romance/Sexual Content Tess has been curious about sex from a young age. At one point she made her sister and her cousin play wedding, and tried to get them to play wedding night by sending them to bed together, but they were little kids and none of them were sure what was supposed to happen. She remains ignorant, other than teachings from St. Vitt, whom her mom believes in. The teachings place a lot of shame and blame on women for any sexual acts, even if they didn’t wish to engage in them. The culture allows men freedom to sleep with whomever they choose, but a woman who becomes pregnant or is found to have had sexual partners is treated poorly.
Tess has had a sexual experience with a young man whom she admires. For most of the story, we don’t really know what happened other than that she got pregnant and he’s gone. It was an unhealthy relationship, clearly, but not until almost the end of the book do we learn what actually happened between them. See spoiler section below for more information and trigger warning.
Disguised as a man (she believes it would be too dangerous to travel as a woman unaccompanied), Tess meets a prostitute who will service both men and women. She does not sleep with the prostitute, but marvels that this woman seems content even happy about her choice of vocation. It flies in the face of everything she was taught to believe about women like this. The woman also challenges Tess by suggesting that women can enjoy sex as well, which Tess wasn’t raised to believe. Much later, Tess masturbates (it’s implied rather than described) and marvels again at how different the experience was from her previous sexual experience.
Eventually, Tess meets a man and develops feelings for him. He teaches her about herbs which prevent a woman getting pregnant and again suggests to Tess that she should enjoy sexual acts. She eventually becomes his lover and they sleep together. It’s not graphically described, but some details are mentioned.
Several people make comments about Seraphina’s relationship with the queen and her consort, implying that she has a sexual relationship with one or both of them.
Quigutls like Tess’s companion change gender several times in their lives. When Tess knew Pathka initially, she was female. Now he is male, though another character still refers to him as mother, since Pathka did lay the egg that hatched her.
Spiritual Content People worship various saints with various creeds on how to live life. The saints are actually people who are part dragon, like Tess’s half-sister Seraphina. When Seraphina gets pregnant without being married, Tess marvels that since her sister is a saint, no one can judge her the way they judged Tess.
Violent Content Tess punches a seminary student in the face for insulting her. Later, she smashes the back of her head into a man’s face when she feels threatened by him. Tess’s companion, Pathka, is a quigutl, a small reptilian creature, and in Pathka’s culture, problems are resolved by the offended party biting the other party. Pathka has several bite encounters with others in the story, some causing pretty severe injury.
Early in her journey, Tess steals food and supplies. She feels guilty, but doesn’t stop for a long time.
Drug Content
At the beginning of the story, Tess has a drinking problem. She gets drunk to avoid remembering the man with whom she got pregnant and to block out her mother’s harsh words. She gets drunk and spills a secret that hurts someone she loves. She also punches someone while drunk. She eventually wrestles with the problem and tries to give up drinking and learn other coping strategies.
SPOILER AND TRIGGER WARNING
Late in the story, Tess reveals what happened between her and her first lover. She tries to tell it as a funny story, but the truth is that he took advantage of her and raped her. There are some graphic details. Her attitude is more reflective rather than being caught in the trauma of the event, but still might trigger readers with past experiences.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
With war between dragons and humans exploding across Seraphina’s once-peaceful home, she vows to find the other gifted half-dragons and use their power to end the conflict. One of Seraphina’s would-be allies seems to have other loyalties. And unstoppable power.
Seraphina works to bring the isolated and fearful half-dragons out of hiding and teach them to operate as a team. Time is running out, however, as an army of dragons threatens to rain destruction down on Seraphina’s homeland. Alliances begin to unravel. A new, unpredictable saint dazzles the people, distracting them from the conflict at hand. In order to pull her own army together, Seraphina will have to understand and unleash the power she has buried inside herself.
The book begins with a clever note from a Goreddi historian summarizing the novel Seraphina, which precedes Shadow Scale. It’s a nice touch and brings readers up to speed nicely. Of course, since Seraphina is a whopping 499 pages, there are a lot of things that get left out. I read Seraphina just a few weeks ago, and I approached Shadow Scale wondering if I’d be able to enjoy it without the background of the first story. I think it could be done, but the second story is so much richer for having read both of them.
As her readers have come to expect, Hartman fills the pages of her tale with well-developed landscapes rich with history, culture and religion. I loved that the stories about the saints played a part in the grander plot. Though Seraphina is the main character, many other characters play important roles. They are well-developed and intriguing.
Readers who enjoyed Seraphina are very likely to enjoy this second book as well. Those who haven’t read Seraphina yet can still enjoy Shadow Scale, but I’d recommend reading Seraphina first. You’ll get a lot more out of the experience.
Profanity Content
none
Sexual Content There’s a pretty intense kissing moment which seems like it could go further but the characters stop themselves, not wanting to be impulsive. There is a very brief girl-on-girl kiss. One culture uses a large number of pronouns to address its citizens, including a category for “emergent feminine.” It could be that Hartman means this as a way for transgender individuals to be more accurately addressed. It’s not deeply explored.
A dragon briefly discusses his hopes of being mated with another dragon in a conversation with Seraphina.
Spiritual Content Citizens of Goredd worship a large collection of saints. The story often references various writings by different saints. In Porphyry, the people worship a god of chance and goddess of necessity.
Violence Brief references to torture (no details.) In several scenes, dragons battle one another.
When Oliver’s parents disappear along with some islands in the bay outside his home, he decides to follow them. Raised by world-renowned explorers, Oliver isn’t daunted when the islands turn out to be living, migrating creatures or when a nearsighted mermaid blunders into his expedition. Oliver befriends the island and mer-girl and together they set off to rescue his parents.
Each character in the story faces an obstacle which requires courage to overcome. Oliver, who grew up simply wishing for a normal life, learns the value of his wilderness education when it takes every ounce of his bravery and resourcefulness to save his parents from an evil island. Iris learns that her voice can be a weapon. Together they challenge the bully who swiped ornaments from the island they’ve befriended and who holds Oliver’s parents captive.
This book is packed with hilarious illustrations and quirky characters. The story is as whimsical as it is fun. Iris, the unusual mermaid, and Oliver make a good team and balance the story, making it a great read for boys and girls alike.
Language Content
No profanity.
Sexual Content None.
Spiritual Content None.
Violence Brief references to rumors of human sacrifice.
Drug Content
None.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
When Zayele is promised to the prince against her will, she vows to escape her fate and return home to her family. The perfect opportunity arises when a curious jinni who wanders too close. Zayele seizes the girl and forces the jinni to take her place.
The jinni girl, Najwa, indeed takes Zayele’s place. Instead of returning home as she asked, Zayele finds herself trapped in the jinni world, where she is mistaken for Najwa. There she learns not all the rumors she’s grown up believing about jinni are true.
Trapped in Zayele’s place, Najwa tries her best to play the part of the betrothed princess. If she’s discovered – a jinni living in the Baghdad palace – she’ll surely be killed.
As the girls learn more about the history between humans and jinni, they uncover a sinister plot which means to destroy the jinni once and for all. Only together can they thwart the powerful new weapon which threatens all jinni and both their lives.
Threaded with suspense and romance, Lough weaves a cunning, fantastic tale of a kingdom besieged by fear and hatred. Through the eyes of two young girls, the reader experiences mirrored stories – one human, one jinn – showing the loss and tragedy created by war.
Lough captures the voice of fairytale and fancy, carrying the reader off to places and times unknown. Though this story doesn’t have the same lyrical beauty as some other Eastern stories, what it does well is marry a modern style to a fantasy story. This makes it a lot more accessible to readers who aren’t big fantasy fans, but who are looking for tales of forbidden romance.
I also liked that while the girls each have a part in battling the story’s villain, the boys who’ve stolen their hearts are quick, smart and powerful, making a good balance of characters. I’m all for strong heroines, but I dislike weak men as their counterparts. Lough’s characters complement one another well.
However, it’s Rahela, the princess’ companion who steals my heart. Though she first appears meek and fearful, Rahela’s true nature emerges when her cousin leaves her behind with a jinni. Instead of raising the alarm, Rahela reacts coolly. It is she who keeps her head and helps Najwa succeed in pretending to be Princess Zayele. While I loved the story and the other characters, I couldn’t help admiring her most.
Profanity and Crude Language Content
No profanity.
Sexual Content Kissing.
Spiritual Content A brief reference to origin of jinni tells of a man who found an angel who had crashed into earth and helped, thinking this was a test from God. Afterward, he discovers he’d helped a fallen angel, who then transformed him into a jinni.
The story is set in and near Baghdad, and contains several references to Allah and regular prayer times.
Violence Zayele recalls the incident which left her brother blind. War between humans and jinni causes casualties to both sides. Battle descriptions are brief and without any gory details.
Drug Content
None.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
