The Fantastic Freshman

by Bill Brittain

Miraculous luck from a magic charm grants fourteen-year-old Stanley his deepest desire, to be a VIP in his high school, but the exhausting and comical complications make his life miserable.

Genres: Young Adult

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

William E. Brittain was an American writer. He is best known for work set in the fictional New England village of Coven Tree, including The Wish Giver, a Newbery Honor Book.
Brittain was born in Rochester, New York. He decided he wanted to be a 5th-grade teacher, and in addition to teaching, used to read stories in mystery magazines. After some time, he decided he could do as good a job at writing as some of the authors he read; he got coaching on writing from Frederic Dannay of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (in which, along with Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, most of his mystery stories were published). He wrote two serials from 1964 to 1983, as well as other stories, before moving on to the children's books for which he is better known.
Brittain is also the author of the popular book All the Money in the World, which was adapted as a 1983 movie.

Reviews

[Rad · Rating 4 out of 5]

High school freshman Stanley Muffet longs for one thing and one thing only – being a Very Important Person. His ambition is so great, he doesn’t even stop to consider the strange events that occur in his first week of school. First, every answer he gives in every class is right, making him a teacher’s pet. Second, he inadvertently joins the football team, then becomes its quarterback. Third, cheerleading bombshell Gwen “Peachy” Keene insists on taking him to the big dance. By the time Stanley realizes that magic is involved, he’s such a VIP he wonders if he’ll ever get to return to normal life and talk to his two friends, Norma and Buster, again. Peppered with funny and unique descriptions (he describes a tormentor as being “the size and shape of a piano crate, with a face a mule would have been ashamed of” (23).), Brittain’s prose is light and fanciful, which fits the magic plot well (even if the magic is introduced late in the book).

Basically, this book is GOLDEN and I love its cheesiness and I want a copy so bad it hurts. (I checked it out of the library, but obviously had to return it.)