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My comments on Chapter 4 (Theo):
> We would laugh at English teachers if they came into class and practiced reading tea leaves or pulled out a deck of tarot cards, but it’s so totally normal that they teach about “looking for symbols” in literature that we would feel something amiss if they didn’t point out the snake in Harry Potter as an indicator of corruption or evil intent… Daisy’s green light in The Great Gatsby as a symbol of the intertwining of love and money… the mockingjay as a stand-in for the unintended consequences of our actions in The Hunger Games. Theo’s psychiatrist, Dr. Abagnale, must have a teacher’s heart because she really jumps all over the symbolism of the rabbit and the school with a cupola that is one of Theo’s unexplained memories.
> Theo’s dad reminds me of Frank Ambrose (RESTART) because Theo says his father told him “middle school was the happiest time of his life.” I think of high school as a more common age range for “glory days.” It’s funny that both Chase and Theo do NOT agree with their dads!
> We’re only four chapters into the story and already some of the “wrong” memories are making sense. We as the readers know more than Theo does about what’s going on, because we’ve seen Reef experience the rock that Declan hurled at him. Gordon Korman get a lot of comments about using multiple narrators or alternating points of view. He does this extraordinarily well: The story progresses without feeling like we’re seeing every moment twice, but at the same time I don’t feel like I’m missing anything important from one protagonist just because the other protagonist is narrating a particular time period. (By chance, I read something the other day about literature written with multiple first-person narrators. I think of it as a newer writing technique but William Faulkner was doing it almost a century ago, and Wilkie Collins was writing detective stories and mysteries in the mid-1800s.)
@Jena Harper: My comment about the reaction to “not being invited” is that I experienced a similar worry when I was young as Theo does after his karate practice. It’s uncomfortable to feel excluded but Theo’s dad is at least partially right, sometimes the best thing is to just join the group instead of letting yourself feel left out. You picked two great ones with RESTART and SCHOOLED. I agree, both of those are books with good life lessons (in addition to being fun and sometimes funny reads).