MMGM- Scouts

It's Marvelous Middle Grade Monday at Always in the Middle and #IMWAYR day at Teach Mentor Texts and Unleashing Readers. It's also Nonfiction Monday.

Greenland, Shannon. Scouts.
July 23rd 2019 by Jimmy Patterson
ARC provided by the publisher upon request

Annie loves to hang out with her friends in 1985. They have camp outs, go on adventures, and occasionally get in trouble for doing things like climbing silos. Her mother thinks that as she approaches middle school, she should be more lady like, but Annie disagrees. So do her friends Beans, Fynn, and Rocky. When Fynn's cousin Scarlet is visiting when the Scouts are prepared to watch a meteor shower, they have to bring her along. The meteor shower is great, but the kids think they see a meteor go down. The calculations indicate it's fifteen miles away, so why not go in search of it. Leaving a series of notes that insure that it will be well into the next day before any adults can locate them, they pack supplies and head off on foot. Annie isn't happy that Scarlet is along, especially since the boys act differently around a girl-- she's just Annie. Not only are there skeletons in caves, teens with three legged dogs, a suspiciously criminal family and mysterious silver dust from the meteor, but the kids have their own problems. Fynn's divorced mother and Rocky's widowed father are dating, and Bean's family is in danger of losing their home. Annie is worried that her group of friends will fall apart, but the trip reinforces rather than breaks their bond.
Strengths: You can talk until you're blue in the face about the fact that there shouldn't be "girl books" and "boy books", but in order for this to work in practicality, a lot of social programming needs to be undone for most students. This is a great book because while it does have a girl as the main character, there is nothing about the cover or the story to make boys physically recoil from this the way they do from, say Hamster Princess. Annie's brief thoughts about her friends being boys might actually make some readers stop and say "Huh. It shouldn't be that way.", which is helpful. On top of that, this is just a great story. Out all night camping, crossing dangerous rivers despite fears, wandering around the countryside without enough supplies because they keep being lost in scrapes-- fun stuff, with a side helping of seriousness. The tag line on this is "Stranger Things meets Goonies"-- I personally don't understand either of these, but my students seem to like Stranger Things.
Weaknesses: The "hillbilly" family with Mary Jo and Otis wasn't my favorite part, but they were involved in a nice twist at the end. I also could have used a little more explanation for what the meteors actually were, but it wasn't that essential to the adventure story.
What I really think: I will definitely purchase a copy and hope it increases circulation of this author's The Specialists series, which my daughter loved in middle school and which I haven't weeded because of that. (Weeding is definitely partly emotional in my world!)