My Weird School Daze #12: Ms. Leakey Is Freaky!

An eccentric health teacher descends upon Ella Mentry School to teach healthy eating habits, by force if necessary. This humorous tale uses a lot of exaggerated superlative language like, “the most amazing thing in the history of the world,” which is repeated about a dozen times throughout the

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course of the book. The adult characters do some weird stuff, such as build a robot which drinks beer in class, but this is offset by one of the characters wondering out loud if these things are really appropriate for children. There are also a lot of references to chemical food products such as sodium acid pyrophosphate, but it is made clear that these are big confusing words that make little sense. Other teachers from the “My Weird School Daze” series appear in this book, helping tie in this book with the rest of the series in a manner which doesn’t feel forced. The chapter where the health teacher opens her own restaurant could have easily been edited out of the narrative, but otherwise this is a lighthearted tale with a good moral about healthy eating while not going “overboard.” The digital cartoon illustrations tie in well with the comical tone and are often exaggerated in a similar nature as the text. The scattered illustrations help break up the text without making it look too young for its audience, and the length of 102 pages adds a sense of achievement to completing this transitional chapter book. Recommended for children ages seven to eight.

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