Making the Grade. (Bayview High). H.G. Sotzek. St. Catharines, ON: Vanwell, 2003. 127 pp., pbk., $7.95. ISBN 1-55068-095-1. Grades 6-9 / Ages 11-14. Review by Dave Jenkinson. ** /4

excerpt:

The guidance office was no help at all. There was no debating course at all this year - not even at another school.

Mrs. Haskins gave him one final piece of advice before he left. “High grades are important, Riley. You also need to take a variety of subjects. I see that you have not taken any art courses yet. The photography course should be a good fit for you,” she said. That was the end of the discussion.

September finds Riley Jackson about to enter his last year of high school at Bayview High where, for the past three years, he has battled with Lulu Fontaine for top grades. Finishing first in his graduating year will assist Riley in gaining admission to the finest business school, a goal given him by his demanding but distant lawyer parents. Bayview High, however, puts an impediment in Riley’s way when it cancels the advanced debating course, a subject his parents see as a prerequisite for a business career, and replaces it with a photography course. Initially Riley views photography as a mickey-mouse class that will provide him with a good grade in return for little work, but then he becomes so interested in the subject that he neglects his other courses. Faced with a French course deadline that he cannot meet, Riley resorts to “borrowing” a paper from the Internet. However, having resisted actually submitting the paper, Riley must still face showing his parents his less than stellar report card. When he attempts to duplicate and modify his report, his act of falsifying the document is discovered by his parents who threaten to send him to a private boys boarding school in order that he improve his grades. Riley’s unformed response is to run away. While chance had already played a role in the plot (the day Riley intends to submit the internet French paper just happens to be the same day that the principal holds a school assembly in which the topic is plagiarism), the author’s use of coincidence at the novel’s conclusion will exceed the limits of even credulous readers. In his nocturnal wanderings after leaving his home, Riley rescues a girl from being run over by a train, and it turns out that the almost victim is Lulu, Riley’s academic rival, who is having her own problems with parents. When Riley decides to return home to confront his parents with his career decision to become a photographer and not a business man, his mother reveals that she had taken art and photography in first year university before her parents used the “power of the purse” to force her into taking a program that would lead to a “real” career.

     Given that the “Bayview High” series is aimed at middle years students who are reluctant readers and given that some of these students will not be performing well academically, it is highly unlikely that they will initially make much of an emotional connection with a protagonist who is worrying about whether or not he will be the school’s top academic performer. The real potential point of connection between readers and Riley is to be found in the role some parents attempt to play in determining their children’s career paths. Whether reluctant readers will remain with the book long enough to make that link is the question.

Recommended with reservations.

Dave Jenkinson teaches courses in adolescent literature in the Faculty of Education, the University of Manitoba.

To comment on this title or this review, send mail to cm@umanitoba.ca.

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Published by The Manitoba Library Association ISSN 1201-9364

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