A wonderful, sincere, funny and sad, serious and amusing novel about school. The young teacher Sylvia Barrett—the main character—ends up in the most ordinary American school and, trying in different ways to reach the hearts and souls of her students, unexpectedly realizes what these angry, unhappy, people who don’t believe in their own future and in themselves are truly hiding from the world and from their parents behind the masks of insolence and indifference: they need only love and understanding.
Bel Kaufman lets the novel’s characters express their own thoughts and feelings on their own, and helps them with an unusual textual form: letters from teachers to one another and from students to teachers, interspersed with circulars, children’s pictures, and written assignments. Listen to this book and “let it inspire you to a feat!”—as one of the novel’s heroines writes.