Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar is on tour with CLP Blog Tours June 13-27 with her novel Little Miss Teacher. This story follows Candace Turner and her first year as an English teacher. Candace lands a high school teaching gig straight out of college, and struggles to deal with her career and life in the real real world. Her lesson plans don’t always go as smoothly as she hopes, both in the classroom and in her personal life. Some of her students are wild, her professional outfits are all wrong, she overdoses on NyQuil and passes out on the job, and a tragedy strikes her classroom. She also can’t get her crush to crush on her, her fling with another teacher turns out to be a disaster, and she can’t seem to fit in with the other instructors.
I found Little Miss Teacher to be humorous yet very real. Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar is an English teacher herself, and it felt like I was almost reading through her diary. I had flashbacks of my high school days, and I remember when I had a first year teacher who sometimes looked like she just wanted to give up on us. I remember feeling sympathetic for her when she couldn’t tame us. A behind the scenes look on what a teacher really goes through during the first year was extremely interesting. There were funny parts, such as the NyQuil incident, but there were serious moments too that puts life into perspective, like the death of a student and a health scare with Candace’s best friend and roommate. I would have liked to see a little more on Candace’s friend or crush or family member, something to give the story a little oomph. About halfway through, I started to wonder what exactly the point of the story was, and thought maybe a little more drama would have helped speed it along and capture my attention. But once I finished and looked back on the whole story, I enjoyed learning something new about a profession and the struggles and embarrassing moment’s teachers have. I liked how the lessons plans for the classroom could be related to the lesson plans in life, and I would recommend this book. Thank you to Cassandra and the other great bloggers who participated in this tour!
[Rating: 3.5]
