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|isbn=9780007581276
|website=http://www.bignatebooks.com/
|video=
|aznuk=0007581270
|aznus=0007581270
You'll like as not get déjà vu when I moan again about not being able to follow the publishing history of Big Nate. At least this volume doesn't fit into the reprinted and renamed oldies selection, but I assumed it was in the daily cartoon collection category. No, wrong again – this is one of the [[:Category:Jeff Kinney|Wimpy Kid]]-type novels. And it's a very good one. I'd like to state 'wow, for the nth book in this series it's got a lot going for it', but I have no idea from the book itself what ''n'' is, so I won't. I'll just describe what it has going for it.
I do enjoy the cartoons – a sustained spread of daily yucks on one theme, and a larger, often colour one, to close the week out with. But even these novels have a lot of imagery about them. Each page probably averages two visual beats, so the dialogue is either presented regularly or portrayed as happening in cartoon form. Nate breaks out into other comics he's designed, as well as those others found from a century back, too. It's a really good form – the person reading their first books on their own would never suffer with from word count, and the style used to design everything and everyone is spot on, meaning instant access to this world.
So with his cartoonist head on strong shoulders, [[:Category:Lincoln Peirce|Lincoln Peirce]] fills the book with dynamic situations, a good sense of humour, and a clever plot, neatly encapsulating the elements we recognise from school (the newbie, the grot) with his moral and several other factors. This means this example can avoid other franchises' one-trick books, where we look at just one thing until we reach the end. Here there's clearly been more thought about tying things together – seemingly disparate things pieced together with some decent level of intelligence. And while the end result might look like something that is anathema to the older, more fuddy-duddy school librarian, the result should not be dismissed as some dim-witted picture book.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
[[Super-Loud Sam by Jo Simmons]] took me back to school in a fantastic, fantasy manner. We can also recommend [[Big Nate in the Zone by Lincoln Peirce]].
{{amazontext|amazon=0007581270}}

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