About the Author:
San Francisco author Jane Cutler has written fifteen children?s books, aimed at audiences ranging from beginning readers to young adults. One picture book, Darcy and Gran Don?t Like Babies, is a Reading Rainbow selection and another, The Cello of Mr. O, has been performed as musical theater in Japan and in Canada. She is on the web at www.janecutler.com.
From Kirkus Reviews:
Gary is a student with learning disabilities who is tormented by his classmates and berated by an unsympathetic teacher. He lives with his timid mother and dreads visits with his fitness-crazed father and stepmother. To escape from his problems he frequently spaces out, shutting out the world around him. When he is placed in a special class, the gifted teacher and understanding classmates help him deal with his problems. Cutler (Rats!, 1996, etc.) gets Gary's symptoms right and everything else wrong, as if she plucked his problems out of a textbook, with no understanding of the underlying pathology. Readers will believe Gary's behavior is the result of his conscious choices, rather than beyond his control. The one-dimensional characterizations of the secondary players (pushover mother, hard-driving and insensitive father, mean teacher, tough but gifted special-ed teacher, nasty ``normal'' classmates, kind and understanding special-ed students), combined with pat solutions, miraculous changes in characters, and negligent school practices, add up to a disservice to learning-disabled children and almost no real story. (Fiction. 9-13) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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