SCHOOLED, by Jamie Sumner, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, Aug. 26, 2025, Hardcover, $17.99 (ages 10 and up)
An 11-year-old ends up attending sixth grade at a college after his dad accepts a job as a professor in Schooled, a middle-grade novel by Jamie Sumner.
Eleven-year-old Lenny Syms is about to start college—sort of. As part of a brand-new experimental school, Lenny and four other students are starting sixth grade on a university campus, where they’ll be taught by the most brilliant professors and given every resource imaginable.
This new school is pretty weird, though. Instead of hunkering down behind a desk to study math, science, and history, Lenny finds himself meditating, participating in discussions where you don’t even have to raise your hand, and spying on the campus population in the name of anthropology.
But Lenny just lost his mom, and his Latin professor dad is better with dead languages than actual human beings. Lenny doesn’t want to be part of some learning experiment. He just wants to be left alone. Yet if Lenny is going to make it as a middle schooler on a college campus, he’s going to need help. Is a group of misfit sixth graders and one particularly quirky professor enough to pull him out of his sadness and back into the world? —Synopsis provided by Atheneum Books for Young Readers
If there’s one thing kids like reading about, it’s other kids attending some sort of magical, mystical or weird school. In part, it’s because the like to imagine themselves in these different places, having adventures.
In Schooled the kids attend an untraditional school in an untraditional setting. It’s up to the kids to decide what to study. The entire campus is open for them to explore. They can audit whatever classes they want, and design a yearlong project that caters to their interests.
And, as Lenny quickly learns, there is very little supervision. And with no real motivation to do anything, Lenny spends most of the first half of the year doing a whole lot of nothing. And when Lenny does find a topic he’s interested in, his father forbids him to do it.
Lenny is a compelling narrator with a strong voice and big heart. He’s the kind of kid you root for and the kind of kid you want to be friends with.
Author Jamie Sumner’s writing feels fresh and inviting. And her exploration of loss has a nice amount of juxtaposing humor.
At approximately 220 pages, Schooled is a fast-moving novel that will appeal to middle-schoolers and soon-to-be middle-schoolers who are experiencing new schools and new friendships, too.
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