Rating: WARTY!
I listened to the very short Audio Library Edition (two disks) of this, and once again I was not impressed by Johnny Heller's voice. This was a first person PoV story - nearly always a disastrous voice to use, but to have a mature man reading this when the kid is a third grader (seven or so years old) just was wrong! The text was a mite too mature for a kid that age, and Heller's reading voice isn't that great either.
The story features George, who has just moved up to third grade along with his classmates and is looking to exploit the third grade angles. This story is a prequel to Spinelli's Fourth Grade Rats - a title based on a rhyme: "First grade babies, second grade cats, third grade angels, fourth grade rats." What the heck that's supposed to mean, I have no idea, and I haven't read the fourth grade book, being unaware of its existence until now. I picked this up in the library because the blurb once again fooled me into thinking it might be worth reading (or in this case, worth a listen).
For reasons unexplained, George has been really looking forward to third grade. When he arrives in Mrs Simms class, he learns she has a program of doing good for which she will award a halo each week. Let's not get into the inappropriateness of bringing religion into public schools here, but I'll touch on this again shortly!
There are twenty-four kids in the class, so every one of them has a chance to win, and George wants to be the first winner. He throws himself whole-heartedly into being good and doing good, and can't understand why so many other kids seem not to care. George, rather misled by his mom, realizes that Mrs Simms might have friends who will tell on him if he's bad, even when he's out of school, so his goody-two-shoes program has to be extended to twenty-four-seven, and it's tough, but he sticks with it.
My problem with this story is that aside from the wrong voice and the wrong narrator and the questionable age-appropriateness of the language and thought processes of the main character, it was so wrong-headed as to be laughable. The tactic Simms employed here was the same as organized religion has employed for millennia!
The incentive to do good doesn't get any impetus from the fact that being considerate and taking care of others is the sensible, logical, and right thing to do, but solely from the fact that you will get a reward if you do good. This is entirely wrong-thinking and it doesn't surprise me that it fails so miserably, especially when the "reward" in this case, is a cheap halo and in the case of organized religion is an eternity of suck-up slavery to a megalomaniac god.
So in short I can't recommend this because not only is it a poorly written (and narrated) story, but also because the very premise is a joke.
