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Book Review::Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick

Title, Author & Publisher:Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick, Blue Sky Press (an imprint of Scholastic, Inc), 1993.

Length: 160 pages without illustrations.

Print size:Slightly bigger than 'standard', but not childish. .

Other readability issues: This is a straightforward story told in the first person. It doesn't require a lot of inferences, though there are times when the reader is expected to know more than the narrator. For example, his grandmother"shushes him and says don't ever say that, because little pictures have big ears" - and since he doesn't know what his grandmother was really saying, many readers won't either.

Summary: Max is a big eighth grader in LD classes, whose father is in jail for murder. When he makes friends with his brilliant neighbor with a serious birth defect, they become a team.

The story provides many opportunities to explore subplots -- the social dynamics and the way Kevin uses social skills to keep them out of trouble, and the various relationships in the different families.

Typical words: Typical multisyllable/irregular words - you may want to see how many of these words your students can identify before expecting them to read independently. Most of the difficult vocabulary in the book is used by Kevin, who almost always explains what he has said to Max.

There is a movie based upon this book, and there is a sequel as well.