The 14 Fibs of Gregory K by Greg Pincus (review)

Gregory’s family is full of mathematicians, but unfortunately, eleven-year-old Gregory doesn’t like math—he’d much rather be making up stories or penning poems. When his best friend Kelly announces that she’s moving away at the start of the next school year, Gregory must find a way to convince his math-obsessed parents to let him join her at Author’s Camp for a summer to have one last hurrah together. He figures that entering the citywide math competition will get him in their good graces and distract them from his slipping math grade. Meanwhile, his math teacher has agreed to give him extra credit if he completes an additional assignment—a journal chronicling the way math appears in his day-to-day life. Gregory becomes intrigued by the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, realizing that the sequence’s pattern makes for an interesting poetic form; filling his journal with poems he calls “Fibs,” he figures out that he might just have a project for City Math after all. This rather cerebral story is gently silly, with details like an eccentric brother adding a humorous counterpoint to the surprising amount of mathematical information coded into the plot. Although Gregory’s father’s initial disappointment after Gregory’s “coming out” as a poet rather than a numbers guy stretches almost into ludicrousness, Gregory’s difficulties with being different from his parents, living in his older brother’s shadow, and feeling inadequate compared to a smart younger sister will strike a familiar chord with middle-graders struggling to define themselves. There’s a lot of space for this book to open up cross-curricular opportunities in math and literature, and it might also spark interesting book club conversations about how to deal with families whose interests diverge drastically from our own.