Sled Dog School

Terry Lynn Johnson's Sled Dog School is a story for 9 year olds about a boy who is failing maths and brilliant at the one thing nobody at school cares about.

What happens

Matt is eleven. He runs a team of huskies through the woods behind his house, and they listen to him the way they listen to his dad, which he's quietly proud of.

It opens with him racing them to the mailboxes, because a letter is coming from the school district and he needs it before his mum gets there.

He doesn't make it. And the extra-credit project inside is the whole problem. Create a small business plan. Work out your operating costs. Read it to the class every week until the end of term (five times, in front of everyone).

Matt is faster than anyone on the bus and worse at maths than most of them, and Jacob Tonge has made that everybody's business. There's a nickname. There's a chant. It follows him off the bus and down the driveway.

So he starts Matt's Sled Dog School, because dogsledding is the one subject he could teach.

What makes it work is how ordinary the worry underneath is. Matt's dad makes pottery at home in an apron, and Matt wishes he had a normal job. His mum hugs too hard and wears a big paper flower on her jacket. He never noticed any of it until somebody pointed it out, and now he can't stop.

Then Tubbs turns up for lesson one, towed down the bank by a Labrador he can't hold, and disappears into the snow before he's even said hello. Tubbs doesn't go to Matt's school. Tubbs has never heard the chant. You can feel Matt stand up a bit straighter.

The dog detail is lovely too. Ears swivelling back at a called command, ground chicken stirred with an axe handle, the wheel dog who doesn't like being petted. None of it stops to explain itself.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing the bullying is on the page rather than at the edges, with the name-calling repeated and Matt's homework read out to a laughing bus. Some will find that hard going. For a child who has felt got at over one school subject, it may be the most useful part of the book.

What to read next

For more from the same writer, the first Survivor Diaries book drops an eleven-year-old into the water off a capsized whale-watching boat and has him tell a reporter how he got out.