#MMGM Book Review: Schooled, by Jamie Sumner

I'm posting this morning with the Marvelous Middle Grade Mondays blog hop. The hop is sponsored by  Greg Pattridge of Always in the Middle. Check out Greg's blog for a list of additional middle grade reviews. 

This week's book I won in a give-away, thanks to author Jamie Sumner and Rosi Hollinbeck for the chance to read this story!

 

 

Title: Schooled
Author: Jamie Sumner
Publication Info: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2025. 218 pages
Source: Won a paperback in a giveaway from a 3rd party (not the author or publisher)

Publisher's Blurb (Goodreads): 
A bighearted, compulsively readable novel from acclaimed author Jamie Sumner about new schools, unexpected friendships, and overcoming loss.

Eleven-year-old Lenny Syms is about to start college—sort of. As part of a brand-new experimental school, Lenny and four other students are starting sixth grade on a university campus, where they’ll be taught by the most brilliant professors and given every resource imaginable. This new school is pretty weird, though. Instead of hunkering down behind a desk to study math, science, and history, Lenny finds himself meditating, participating in discussions where you don’t even have to raise your hand, and spying on the campus population in the name of anthropology.

But Lenny just lost his mom, and his Latin professor dad is better with dead languages than actual human beings. Lenny doesn’t want to be part of some learning experiment. He just wants to be left alone. Yet if Lenny is going to make it as a middle schooler on a college campus, he’s going to need help. Is a group of misfit sixth graders and one particularly quirky professor enough to pull him out of his sadness and back into the world?

  

My Review: 
I ended up reading this book in about one day, mostly because I was having insomnia anyway and it seemed a pretty easy and comfortable thing to read at one a.m. Which, in fact, it was, although it was also another dead-parent book. I have mixed feelings about reading those, and this has some pretty intense moments of grieving. 

Lenny's story unfolds nicely, with some real-feeling characters, and people coping with real feelings. It largely (thank goodness) stays away from tween romance, and focuses on dealing with the real stuff in Lenny's life, which can be deeply emotional at some points, and pretty funny at others.

There are a few things that bothered me, as a parent perhaps more than a reader. Not the illicit stuff the kids do, sneaking out at night, but the school. A fascinating idea, and I know the basic format--kids learning by exploring the topics that interest them--isn't new. But this one has an unbelievable lack of accountability. And I worry about sixth-graders who aren't learning any math and science. I ended up feeling like among the 5 of them they maybe learned most of what kids should learn in sixth grade, but each kid crawled into a silo and stayed there. Honestly, just tell them to audit some classes and give no guidance on how they might find ones of interest?

Okay, pedagogic worries aside, it's an enjoyable read. I really liked watching Lenny actually doing the work the profs want, even while he thinks he's rebelling and cutting class. I could see most of the major turning points coming, which honestly is kind of nice sometimes, and there are a lot of caring people in this story, children and adults (hooray for no bullies!), which is a pleasure.

My Recommendation:
Ages nine and up, possibly with guidance to deal with the idea of the loss of a parent and the sometimes disturbing ways in which grief happens in this book, not to mention some of the things the kids get up to as they are enjoying their unsupervised learning experiences.

 

FTC Disclosure: I won a paperback of Schooled in a 3rd-party giveaway, and received nothing from the writer or publisher in exchange for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  



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 ©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2026 

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