The Worst Class Trip Ever by Dave Barry (review)

Miami native Wyatt Palmer is used to crazy things that only happen in Miami, like when his dad goes out to get the morning paper in a pair of holey boxer shorts and ends up on the evening news because he got chased by an alligator in their yard. However, he isn’t ready for the wild adventure his eighth-grade class trip to Washington, DC, turns out to be when his idiot best friend, Matt, convinces him that the two men sitting behind them on the plane are terrorists with designs on the Capitol. To Matt’s credit, the device he steals from the guys’ backpack is in fact a military-grade radar jammer, and they do have a plot that Matt’s theft threatens to foil, resulting in them kidnapping Matt in order to get the device back. Fortunately, Wyatt’s crush, Suzana, is both fearless and fond of intrigue, and between her and a few trusty friends, hair-raising adventure ensues and the day is saved, middleschool style. Barry’s droll wit, shining through Wyatt’s narration, plays exceptionally well for a preteen audience, with explicit ironies and eyerolling observations about Wyatt’s mercurial Cuban mother, the mortifications of having an idiot best friend, and the wistful longings of having an unrequited crush on a popular girl. The outrageous plotting is the real draw here, though; this is a savvy integration of real-world anxieties with the absurdest of absurd hero fantasies, overlaid with a touch of hey-it-could-happen if, you know, you were in a crazy action movie. While the story initially plays on stereotypes of people who come from countries that end in–stan, it upends those stereotypes in ways both clever and hilarious. This one will definitely have action-adventure-obsessed kids looking away from their screens.