Saving Mr. Terupt by Rob Buyea, 2015

Click to view
on Goodreads 

Seventh grade was going to be awesome. The only thing missing was Mr. Terupt.
The kids from Mr. Terupt’s fifth- and sixth-grade classes are entering their first year of junior high school. There’s a lot to be excited about, but there are new challenges, too. Peter and Jeffrey face tough competition on their wrestling team. Alexia has a disastrous first day of school, and that’s only the beginning. Anna is desperate for Charlie to propose to her mother—what is he waiting for?! Danielle isn’t feeling so well, but she's trying to tough it out, like Grandma. Trouble with a bully makes Lukedread going to school for the first time ever. And Jessica is waiting anxiously for an acceptance to a theater retreat in New York City.
Everyone is missing Mr. Terupt. When a fight threatens to break up the group forever, they think their favorite teacher is the only one who can help them. But the kids soon find out that it’s Mr. Terupt who needs saving.
This novel includes extra content in the back of the book. Readers will find a Junior High Survival Guide with tips from the old gang!

(384 pages)

I've loved these books since Because of Mr. Terupt was a standalone, and I didn't even have a book blog. Thus many of you may not know how much I love the Terupt books. Let me tell you now: I. Love. Them. Which is why I was over the moon when I found out that Saving Mr. Terupt was actually a thing. A third Terupt book? Sign me up! I requested it from the library immediately (instead of pre-ordering it, because I was out of shelf space and trying to teach myself the Art of Patience), and snapped it up the day it came in (which was three days after its release date, thank you very much. I hate really don't like my library). I devoured it that same day.

The first thing I discovered was that it had been too long since I read the first two books. It took me a few chapters to remember the ins and outs of who was who. It didn't help that there were three girls and three boys (all conveniently crushing on each other in three neat pairs), and the girls sometimes got kind of muddled together. Then there were pieces of peoples' pasts that I had to scramble to remember, especially Jeffrey's - the whole dead brother thing is never explained at all in this book, and it took me a while to remember what on earth was going on with him. My other main complaint is that it felt like things were constantly escalating. Not that escalating tension is a bad thing (and frankly, Buyea did a great job in general with it), but that every single stinkin' chapter ended with "little did we know, it was just the calm before the storm," or something to that effect. It's like, I get it. Things are going to get worse. Quit saying that and start showing me.

But then, I also really liked how things continued to escalate throughout the book. We start out all happy and gay, excited about a new school year and pledging to remain the best of friends, and then slowly sink lower and lower into the tension and stress that is middle school, until everyone is at pretty much complete odds with each other. I still absolutely adore Mr. Terupt, and I was completely behind everything the gang did as they fought to help him. I saw literally every twist coming (except the one with Jessica, when she went you-know-where and met you-know-who), but that didn't stop me from feeling bad for Mr. Terupt, and rooting for him to come out on top.

I always loved how there were so many different characters telling the story in the Terupt books, because it allowed a more complete view of events - and it made it possible to actually have six main characters I could still keep straight (most of the time). I continued to enjoy reading about six very different kids in Saving Mr. Terupt, and I appreciated the fact that they were all struggling with very different issues throughout the book and yet the narration never began to feel disjointed.

All in all, I really enjoyed Saving Mr. Terupt. I don't think it's quite as good as the first two books, but they're so good that it's only in comparison that it comes up (slightly) lacking. I still recommend it to all fans of the previous books, and would even recommend it on its own merits to people who haven't read the rest of the series, except it wouldn't make one bit of sense if you came in without all the backstory from the first two books. But yeah, definitely a great book. Someday I'll buy the second and third Terupt books and complete my collection (which is currently a collection of one).

Genuine Sweet by Faith Harkey, 2015

Click to view
on Goodreads 

Twelve-year-old Genuine Sweet, of tiny Sass, Georgia, can grant any wish . . . except her own. It's a peculiar predicament, considering how much she could use a few wishes. New friends help Genuine give her family a boost--and then she takes her gift global! Life finally seems to be on the mend. But when she's faced with unexpected trouble that no amount of wishing can fix, Genuine must puzzle out the difference between wishing for a better life and building one.
Told in the engaging, irresistible voice of Genuine Sweet herself, Faith Harkey's debut novel spins a remarkable tale of a small-town girl with big-time magic and an even bigger heart.

(288 pages)

I needed this book. Neck-deep in studying for my AP exams, my brain was fried and my patience thin. I had the sinking sensation that only comes when my stock of reviews has bled dry and I've got a week of reviews in my backlog before I'm plumb out of content. I had a couple of books on my review pile, but none that really caught my eye and made me pour out a heartfelt review for. The TBR pile at the foot of my bed was full of appealing titles, but they had been sitting there waiting for so long that they already felt cliche and already done.

And that's where Genuine Sweet came in. I'd seen a review of it somewhere and requested it on a whim, and the day I hit my all-time low this new, shiny book popped into my hands screaming "I'm fun! I'm unique! I'll make you smile!" And it sure was. And did. Out of all the small-town-quirky-magic books I've read in my life, this one has carved its own spot. Where many "uniquely quirky" books fail in their use of the same old outside-the-box tropes, Genuine Sweet manages to take a lonely girl with negligent/dead parents, a loving/wise grandmother, and a new best friend, and actually make something new out of it.

The idea of wish-fetching is a very neat one, and I love that Harkey uses it to dig deep into the selfishness of human nature, through the people who harass Genuine for wishes, and the true potential of wish fetching - saving people in third-world countries. The fact that Geniune and Jura are so concerned about making the world a better place was just awesome.

However, I would be leery of recommending Genuine Sweet as a Middle Grade book. Harkey crafts a great story, but she includes enough mature themes that i know I for one won't be handing this off to my middle-school aged brother. For example, Genuine has an extremely sweet and touching slow-bloom relationship with a boy (whom I won't name for fear of spoilers) that I absolutely adored for as long as I could forget the fact that they were in middle school. Then I remembered, and I liked it a whole lot less. It's just weird when they're that age!

Actually, that's probably the biggest issue with this book: Genuine's age. If only she were seventeen, and then I could adore the book to pieces without feeling uncomfortable! As it is, I can still adore it, but I can't figure out who to recommend it to. I guess I'd offer it to fans of books like Savvy, Scumble, Drizzle, and Remarkable. It ranks right up there by the best of this sub-genre of quirky small-town magic, and would be absolutely perfect if Genuine were just five years older.

The Great Greene Heist by Varian Johnson, 2014

Click to view
on Goodreads 

Saving the school -- one con at a time.
Jackson Greene has reformed. No, really he has. He became famous for the Shakedown at Shimmering Hills, and everyone still talks about the Blitz at the Fitz.... But after the disaster of the Mid-Day PDA, he swore off scheming and conning for good.
Then Keith Sinclair -- loser of the Blitz -- announces he's running for school president, against Jackson's former best friend Gaby de la Cruz. Gaby hasn't talked to Jackson since the PDA, and he knows she won't welcome his involvement. But he also knows Keith has "connections" to the principal, which could win him the election whatever the vote count.
So Jackson assembles a crack team to ensure the election is done right: Hashemi Larijani, tech genius. Victor Cho, bankroll. Megan Feldman, science goddess and cheerleader. Charlie de la Cruz, point man. Together they devise a plan that will bring Keith down once and for all. Yet as Jackson draws closer to Gaby again, he realizes the election isn't the only thing he wants to win.
(240 pages)

I deliberated about even writing a review for this one, because I read it so quickly. It's not the best book I've ever read or the worst, just somewhere in the unmemorable middle. I'll mainly keep track of it as a recommendation for fans of Gordon Korman, Dan Gutman, and the like, but I figured I should probably write out my thoughts as a reference for when I can't remember what I thought of the book.

Basically, it's Gordon Korman's Swindle series with some of the humor taken out, and some middle school romance added in. This makes it sound pretty bad, but it was actually pretty fun! It had a bit more of a straight-laced story than did the Swindle books, with a lot more focus on the plot and the driving conflicts than on characterization. I don't really know a whole lot about Jackson outside of his strange criminal mastermind-like persona and his love/like (whatever you want to call it) for his former best friend Gabby, who currently hates him. It takes most of the book for Jackson to get anywhere with Gabby, and I really appreciated that. It could have turned into a cheesy love-fest anywhere in the book, but it chose instead to remain palatable.

The characters were painted with pretty broad brushes. On the plus side, they're not caricatures. On the minus, there are so many of them I got them mixed up a couple of times. They have personalities, but they're kind of vague personalities that are really easy to get confused. Jackson was rather unrealistic as this genius spy-master who learned all sorts of tricks from his grandfather, a master con-man. The scenes with Jackson's father definitely made me roll my eyes and want to yell "You can read people's expressions, not their minds, guys, so bring the pride thing down a notch, okay?" You have to just take certain things in this book with a grain of salt, though, so I just sort of rolled with it.

Besides the unrealistic-ness of Jackson's skills, it was a fun book. It's just the sort of book I'd give to my brother - except I won't, because there's too much of a romantic undertow throughout the book for him to enjoy it. I wouldn't really recommend it to more mature fans of romantic adventure books, either, because the romance isn't as good as a lot of stuff out there (and frankly, I am not the biggest fan of middle school romance in general). However, if it interests you enough that you're still trying to decide whether not to read it, then you'd probably like it. If you do give it a try, let me know what you think!