Captain Superlative: 12/01/18

Captain Superlative by J.S. Puller is about a student taking a unique way of tackling rampant school bullying. Janey attends Deerwood Park Middle School, a place that the teachers and administrators seem to have no control over. Instead, the popular girl has taken charge and everyone shows their fealty to her by dressing per her standards.

And then one day at the start of a new year, Captain Superlative bursts onto the scene with blue hair and red cape. Janey, so taken in by a girl who is ridiculously upbeat and completely defiant of the popular girl decides to find out everything she can about the girl.

Janey learns the Captain's secret identity and the truth behind her upbeat attitude. It's her last hurrah as she is losing the battle to cancer. It's a hard hitting emotional second half of the book.

Besides being about cancer, it's a treatise against bullying and cliques, especially the ones that try to force homogeneity on students to control them. Reading this as an adult and a parent of a child in middle school, I see Janey's middle school really being more like the type of junior high I went to, rather than a recognizably contemporary middle school.

Three stars

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