Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 03/01/2010 Unabashedly capitalizing on the Wimpy Kid wave (with a Jeff Kinney blurb-recommendation splashed across the cover), Peirce’s book, for a slightly younger audience, uses a mix of prose and cartoons to tell a quick story about a day in the life of an extroverted, impish kid. Peirce does have comics cred on his side: his hero, Nate, has been the star of a long-running daily comic strip. He is the classic clever kid who hates school and whose antics land him in ever-hotter water with grumbly teachers. On this particular day, he wakes up feeling fine, sweats a bit about an upcoming test, then opens a fortune cookie at school that reads, “Today you will surpass all others.” So, he dutifully goes about trying to best other kids at everything but seems to only have a knack for racking up detention slips. The cartoons provide plenty of gags at the expense of various adults and classmates, and Nate’s persistent good cheer and moxie make him a likable new proxy for young misfits. - Copyright 2010 Booklist.

School Library Journal - 04/01/2010 Gr 4–6— Nate is a sixth grader who has a problem with organization. Everything is going wrong, and he's piling up detention after detention. Things start to improve when he gets a fortune cookie with a message stating that he will "surpass all others," giving him a purpose for the day and leading to humorous incidents such as when he tries to beat a speed record for eating green beans, and when he tickles his science teacher with a feather duster. This fully developed protagonist debuted in a comic strip; this is Peirce's first book about him, and it is a successful, laugh-out-loud venture. Readers meet a variety of characters, each with a unique personality or trait. Peirce's black-and-white ink illustrations, whether they are comics Nate has drawn or other funny images, help to develop the story. Big Nate will fill in gaps in collections that are looking for books for reluctant readers, and for Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Abrams) read-alikes.—Lora Van Marel, Orland Park Public Library, IL - Copyright 2010 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

Bulletin for the Center... - 05/01/2010 After years as a newspaper comic, Peirce’s Big Nate now takes a turn in a chapter book. The familiar woes that plague eleven-year-old Big Nate in his comic strip-mean teachers, detention, smart girls, pop quizzes, gym class, etc.-get a longer narrative treatment here, with an almost even balance between text and pictures. Nate moves through his day at P.S. 38 in typical hyperbolic frenzy, spurred on by a fortune cookie assuring him that today he “will surpass all others.” Convinced that he will finally come into his own as a self-proclaimed genius, he manages instead a series of manic mishaps that lead to detention slips from every teacher and the principal-not exactly what he had in mind for greatness, but a school record nonetheless, so he’ll take it. The humor hits all the conceivable humiliations of sixth grade without tipping into anything edgy or particularly original; what carries the day instead are the zany illustrations and the obstreperous energy and unflagging enthusiasm of Nate himself. Fans of Diary of a Wimpy Kid (BCCB 6/07) or of Nate himself will savor this extended treatment of P.S. 38’s most beleaguered hero. KC - Copyright 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.