School of Possibilites Review

TITLE: School of Possibilities
AUTHOR: Seth Parkkola
PUB DATE: June 2010
PUBLISHER: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
PAGES: 368
GENRE: Juvenile Fiction/Middle Grade

ABOUT THE BOOK
Storm Steele is an impossible child.

Or so his parents believe thanks to the influence of his evil “step-monster.” Now Storm is being forced to attend the School of Possibilities for troubled youth. But Storm notices that something strange is going on at his new school. The students are not…normal.

Soon he’s being spied on, followed by classmates—and worst of all, forced to accept the headmaster’s perfectly behaved daughter as his girlfriend. He can feel himself becoming more obedient, more like his classmates. Storm tries to resist, but he doesn’t understand how or why the school is controlling him.

Can Storm escape—or will he be turned into a zombie of “good” behavior like everyone else around him?

MY THOUGHTS
I want to send out a huge thank you to Kay at Sourcebooks Jabberwocky for sending me an advance readers copy of the School of Possibilities.

I have to let you know that I did enjoy reading this book and really got into it near the end where I was having a hard time to put it down because I had to know what happened.

The book is told in the first person, Storm and he is your typical 12 year old boy. What gets him into trouble is the fact that he hopped on a train going no where really and gets caught. He has done this a few times.

His parents aren’t together anymore and his dad is with his new girlfriend Verity. She has a daughter, Mona. Verity works at the School of Possibilities and offers to get Storm into the school as his last chance to change his life around because in her words he is labelled as an impossible child.

As I was reading this I kept thinking that this is like the movie The Stepford Wives. How everything has to be perfect and everyone is like zombies and you basically sell your soul to the devil and obey every rule and be like everyone except yourself.

When Storm enters the school he is told that he must give up his favorite past time which is skate boarding and find a new hobby and get new friends because basically what he has now just is working for him as the headmaster says.

He quickly realizes that this isn’t an ordinary school. The adults are in charge and all the students are like zombies with no real thoughts of their own. They are told how to behave and if you don’t you have consequences and are disciplined with some rather odd methods such as they use the model of the hangman game for every wrong behavior you get a mark.

Of course it seems like the odds are stacked against Storm and it makes you feel as though they are setting him up to fail instead of helping him. He receives his first punishment and that is a girlfriend and she just happens to be the headmaster’s daughter, Bridgette.

As you are reading this you can’t help but want to root for Storm and see him succeed. The only question is can Storm escape before its too late?