Ungifted (review)

The plot is pure Korman: hyperactive, heedless Donovan Curtis whacks a school statue of Atlas with a stick, which sends the huge metal globe on Atlas's shoulders rolling into the gym during a basketball game, which lands Donovan in the superintendent's office, where his name is mistakenly entered by the irate administrator onto a list of candidates for the district's middle-school gifted program. Thus begins Donovan's short-lived career in the Academy of Scholastic Distinction, where he flounders through the program while teachers and fellow classmates try desperately to identify just where his outstanding academic talent lies. Donovan knows very well he doesn't belong, but his eyes have been opened to the perks and privileges and stellar facilities enjoyed by the gifted kids, while the rest of the district makes do with a substandard curriculum, shabby surroundings, and an antagonistic staff. Donovan's predicament is as much satire as typical school-hijinks tale, and middle-school readers will recognize the irony as the Academy's staff, absolutely certain their recruitment protocol is unimpeachable, insist that Donovan must therefore have some academic depths yet to be discovered and plumbed. The lunacy, which revolves around Donovan's shallow yet indispensable contribution to his team's robotics competition, goes over the edge, though, with a subplot in which his gifted class studies his pregnant sister to get "hands-on" mandated credit in Human Growth and Development. While the school's administrative dysfunction is just believable enough to keep the story rolling, field trips to the sister's doctor visits ("We were at a pelvic exam!") exceed the limit of credibility. Nonetheless, kids who relish Korman's brand of subversive mayhem will want to give this a go.