The Perfect Score

The Perfect Score by Rob Buyea is a school story for 10 year olds told by six children who can't stand each other.

What happens

Sixth grade at Lake View Middle was going to be brilliant. Mr Mitchell plays football with his class and hands out extra break. Then a letter arrives. Mr Mitchell has gone, and the school has pulled Mrs Woods out of retirement to cover the year.

Mrs Woods is old. Compression stockings, Velcro shoes, glasses on a chain, and a yardstick she raps on your desk. She's also the toughest person any of these children have met.

You get the year in turns, from six of them. Gavin, who can draw and won't say so. Natalie, who intends to be a lawyer and writes the whole year up as legal briefs. Randi, the gymnast whose mother has her destiny mapped out already. Scott, who blurts. Trevor, who is genuinely unpleasant, and Mark, who follows him about.

That's the pleasure of it. One morning looks completely different depending on whose head you're in, and a child you'd written off gets a chapter of their own later.

And the statewide tests are coming, which nobody in that room wants. The children least of all, and Mrs Woods no more than they do.

Mrs Woods is wonderful. She dims the lights to read aloud, holds a book under her nose and smells it, and tells a boy who says he hates writing that one day he'll want to. (You can see where that's going. It doesn't spoil it at all.)

Worth knowing before you hand it over

One boy makes his all-about-me collage entirely out of magazine photographs of women in bras and underwear, and mentions his older brother's hidden magazines. Another wees down a playground slide to wash bird mess off it, and a girl goes down before he can stop her. Both are played for laughs and both get dealt with by an adult on the page.

If that's your reader's kind of funny, they'll be fine. If they'd find it grubby, it turns up early and you'll know quickly.

There's quieter sadness too. Scott's grandpa has been lonely and forgetful since his wife died two years ago.

What to read next

R. J. Palacio's Wonder is in the library too, and Mrs Woods reads it aloud to this very class. It's about a boy with a face people stare at, starting school for the first time at ten.