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Showing posts with label John Gosselink. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Gosselink. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Emergency readiness goes boink: on The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter, by John Gosselink

The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter, by John Gosselink, is an "epistolary novel". That is, it's told as a series of letters and emails and journals and paperwork and drawings, by or to or concerning 12-year-old Thaddeus, who has been placed in In-School Suspension for the entire second semester of the school year. Thaddeus is the Misunderstood Victim of a Massive Injustice, and he writes primarily to himself, his lawyer uncle Pete, and especially his school principal Frank Cooper, who has never encountered anything like him. He is of course concerned with his own vindication, but he is selfless about it: even in exile, he shares his school improvement (and church improvement) (and scout-troop improvement) schemes, plus his handy educational Thaddeus Fun Facts, and even the official rules of Slug Bug with his persecutors.

Cooper and Pete share their own perspectives, which for some reason aren't always in exact accord. They seem over-worried about discipline forms where the "cause for referral" is a scrawled "HE TRIED TO SET ME ON FIRE!", and too little interested in the perspectives of, say,