Mrs. Ravenbach's way

Format:

Book

Title:

Mrs. Ravenbach's way

Author:

Akers, William M., 1956- author

ISBN:

9781941393581

Edition:

First Regan Arts hardcover edition.

Publication:

New York, NY : Regan Arts, 2016.

Physical Description:

222 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Number in series:

[1]

Summary:

"Being a new student at the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children is crummy enough, but when Toby Wilcox is stuck in the fourth grade homeroom of Mrs. Ravenbach, a vainglorious tyrant who worships "the order and the discipline," he faces a much bigger challenge - fight back or be ground to goo in the gears of academic efficiency." -- Book jacket.

Subject(s):

Teachers -- Juvenile fiction.

Students -- Juvenile fiction.

Gifted children -- Juvenile fiction.

Teachers -- Fiction.

Students -- Fiction.

Gifted children -- Fiction.

Genre:

Added Author:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Monmouth Public Library	J Fic Akers, W. 2016 BK.1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Mrs. Ravenbach, a vaingloriously German woman, teaches year six at the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children and loves order. When a new student, Toby Wilcox, arrives he disrupts her neatly ordered universe. Events spiral as Toby conspires to reveal the tyranny of Mrs. Ravenbach. Toby's journal entries and cartoons are a window into the spirit of a young boy - the humour, the imagination, the loneliness, and the resilience.

Author Notes

William M. Akers , author of Your Screenplay Sucks! 100 Ways To Make It Great , is a Writers Guild Lifetime Member who's had three feature films produced from his screenplays. He's written for studios, independent producers, and the major television networks. Akers gives writing workshops around the world and is a regular speaker at Story Expo in Los Angeles.

He speaks reasonably decent French and was a Jeopardy! contestant.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

A tyrannical fourth-grade teacher wreaks havoc in a young boy's life, until a day of reckoning changes everything. When Tobias Wilcox transfers to the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children, the order-and-discipline-obsessed Mrs. Ravenbach becomes his fourth-grade teacher. Outwardly cheery and self-aggrandizing, this proud product of a German education is also reminiscent of Roald Dahl's evil Miss Trunchbull from Matilda and Professor Umbridge of Harry Potter fame. Akers employs a mix of grade-school ramblings and complex storytelling strategies to explore censorship, honesty, and the uneven power dynamics among teachers, students, parents, and administrators. Mrs. Ravensbach herself narrates events, and Toby's perspective is folded in via journals, the minutes of the submarine-enthusiasts club over which Toby presides, and school poetry. Judging by the book's potent "un-dedication," Akers, a screenwriter and film-studies teacher, is processing frustrations from his own history with this debut novel, the first in the Amazing Escapades of Toby Wilcox series. The over-the-top kid antics will delight readers with similar challenges. However, while the provocative German stereotypes and occasional violent daydreams may have passed as "for kids eyes only" fare in an earlier era, they may not play as well in today's environment. An edgy, subversive revenge fantasy in which kids speak truth to power. (Fiction. 9-11) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.