Schooled
By (Author) Jamie Sumner
Simon & Schuster
Atheneum Books for Young Readers
26th August 2025
United States
Children
Fiction
Childrens / Teenage personal and social topics: Death and grief
Childrens / Teenage general interest: Boys and men
FIC
Hardback
224
Width 140mm, Height 210mm, Spine 17mm
A bighearted, compulsively readable novel from acclaimed author Jamie Sumner about new schools, unexpected friendships, and overcoming loss.
Eleven-year-old Lenny Syms is about to start collegesort of. As part of a brand-new experimental school, Lenny and four other students are starting sixth grade on a university campus, where theyll 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 dont 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 doesnt 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, hes 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
Jamie Sumner is the author ofRoll with It,Time to Roll,Rolling On,Tune It Out,One Kids Trash,The Summer of June,Maid for It,Deep Water, Please Pay Attention, and Schooled.Her work has appeared inTheNew York Times,The Washington Post, and other publications. She loves stories that celebrate the grit and beauty in all kids. Sheis also the mother of a son with cerebral palsy and has written extensively about parenting a child with special needs. She and her family live in Nashville, Tennessee.Visit her at Jamie-Sumner.com.