DWEEB

Five middle-school nerds discover that their DNA is being used to create a master race of students. Dapper Denton, gamer Wendell, ADHD Eddie, anarchist Elijah and eternal optimist Bijay find themselves trapped in the school bomb shelter by maniacal Vice Principal Snodgrass, who plans on using samples of their geek-smart blood to create a 4.0 serum that will insure high test scores and his eventual promotion. It takes these smarty-pants half the slow-paced story to find out why they have been taken, then the rest to engineer a ponderous escape. There is also a national burger chain taking over the cafeteria and a mysterious growling coming from inside the school walls, two red herrings that, even if fished out, could not have saved this convoluted plot. The indistinguishable voices of the main characters and thinly veiled messages concerning the evils of standardized testing and fast-food chains don’t help. A better take on the same theme is The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy (2008), by Diane Stanley. (Fiction. 10-13)