This is a tale about a team, a class, a school, a series of contests and, set in the midst of this, four jewel-like short stories—one for each of the team members—that ask questions and demonstrate surprising answers.
How had Mrs. Olinski chosen her sixth-grade Academic Bowl team? She had a number of answers. But were any of them true? How had she really chosen Noah and Nadia and Ethan and Julian? And why did they make such a good team? It was a surprise to a lot of people when Mrs. Olinski's team won the sixth-grade Academic Bowl contest at Epiphany Middle School. It was an even bigger surprise when they beat the seventh grade and the eighth grade, too. And when they went on to even greater victories, everyone began to ask: How did it happen?
It happened at least partly because Noah had been the best man (quite by accident) at the wedding of Ethan's grandmother and Nadia's grandfather. It happened because Nadia discovered that she could not let a lot of baby turtles die. It happened when Ethan could not let Julian face disaster alone. And it happened because Julian valued something important in himself and saw in the other three something he also valued. Mrs. Olinski, returning to teaching after having been injured in an automobile accident, found that her Academic Bowl team became her answer to finding confidence and success. What she did not know, at least at first, was that her team knew more than she did the answer to why they had been chosen.
Newberry Medal Winner
Reviews
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More than any other children's novel published in recent years, this 1997 Newbery Medal winner, with its multiple viewpoints, is an appropriate candidate for the six voices of this audio production. What might be difficult to unravel when read silently, or even when read aloud by a solitary voice, comes alive in this rendering by six actors, each weaving a single thread. Within their individual chapters, the actors employ accents and voicing to characterize the ethnic and regional traits of secondary characters. The distinct individual voices of the narrator, the four Souls, and the question-reader bring the patterns of this complex weaving into focus. T.B. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
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