Mrs. Ravenbach's Way: A Novel

by William M. Akers

Overview

A wickedly funny first novel about a dictatorial teacher and the irrepressible boy who stands up to her.

Being a new student at the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children is crummy enough, but when Toby Wilcox is stuck in the fourth grade homeroom of Mrs. Ravenbach, a vainglorious German tyrant who worships "the order and the discipline," he faces a much bigger challenge—fight back or be ground to goo in the gears of Teutonic efficiency.

Toby upends Mrs. Ravenbach's perfectly ordered universe and risks everything to strike a blow for free-thinkers everywhere!

Mrs. Ravenbach’s Way is the first book in the series: The Amazing Escapades of Toby Wilcox.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941393925
Publisher:	Regan Arts.
Publication date:	03/08/2016
Series:	Amazing Escapades of Toby Wilcox , #1
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	45 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

William M. Akers, author of Your Screenplay Sucks! 100 Ways To Make It Great, is a Writers Guild Lifetime Member who's had three feature films produced from his screenplays. He's written for studios, independent producers, and the major television networks. Akers gives writing workshops around the world and is a regular speaker at Story Expo in Los Angeles.

He speaks reasonably decent French and was a Jeopardy! contestant.

Editorial Reviews

“An edgy, subversive revenge fantasy in which kids speak truth to power . . . The order-and-discipline-obsessed Mrs. Ravenbach . . . is also reminiscent of Roald Dahl's evil Miss Trunchbull from Matilda and Professor Umbridge of Harry Potter fame.”

— Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

06/01/2016
Gr 5 Up—This first in a planned series introduces Toby Wilcox as he starts fourth grade at the McKegway School for Clever & Gifted Children and immediately clashes with Mrs. Ravenbach, a teacher in the vein of Matilda's Miss Trunchbull. Mrs. Ravenbach, a self-described "wonderfully German woman," values "order and discipline" above all else. Now striving for her fifth Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching, she isn't about to let Toby, a "sweaty tub of sass," get in her way. Of course her plot to get him expelled backfires, and Toby's own clever plan exposes her in front of the whole school. The story is told mostly from Mrs. Ravenbach's point of view, with Toby's journal entries interspersed. A decidedly mean-spirited tale (Mrs. Ravenbach gleefully frightens Toby into wetting himself in front of the class; Toby's journal entries detail all the violent ways he would like to get revenge). VERDICT This may be more appealing to adults who still have revenge fantasies about their childhood teachers.—Laurie Slagenwhite Walters, Brighton District Library, Brighton, MI

School Library Journal

2015-12-08
A tyrannical fourth-grade teacher wreaks havoc in a young boy's life, until a day of reckoning changes everything. When Tobias Wilcox transfers to the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children, the order-and-discipline-obsessed Mrs. Ravenbach becomes his fourth-grade teacher. Outwardly cheery and self-aggrandizing, this proud product of a German education is also reminiscent of Roald Dahl's evil Miss Trunchbull from Matilda and Professor Umbridge of Harry Potter fame. Akers employs a mix of grade-school ramblings and complex storytelling strategies to explore censorship, honesty, and the uneven power dynamics among teachers, students, parents, and administrators. Mrs. Ravensbach herself narrates events, and Toby's perspective is folded in via journals, the minutes of the submarine-enthusiasts club over which Toby presides, and school poetry. Judging by the book's potent "un-dedication," Akers, a screenwriter and film-studies teacher, is processing frustrations from his own history with this debut novel, the first in the Amazing Escapades of Toby Wilcox series. The over-the-top kid antics will delight readers with similar challenges. However, while the provocative German stereotypes and occasional violent daydreams may have passed as "for kids eyes only" fare in an earlier era, they may not play as well in today's environment. An edgy, subversive revenge fantasy in which kids speak truth to power. (Fiction. 9-11)

Kirkus Reviews