Dec 8, 2025
I read this in a couple of hours over the weekend, and can recommend it as a fundamentally optimistic look at the work that secondary teachers do (though it's also something of an elegy/jeremiad on the subject of administrative red tape and reactionary PTA parents.) Personally, I found Bruce Holsinger's The Gifted School to be more effective and nuanced in how it handled e.g. race and immigration in 21st-century US school environments. And I was unsurprised, given the tone and sentence structure of this, to learn that Mathieu has previously written YA novels. But I liked its characters, as the author clearly meant me to do.
