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No Comments The Post of Shame
What can I say? Yes, all the kids got off to school okay yesterday, but what with an unexpected visitor, Wednesday being my volunteer day with the elementary school, and Costco–I didn’t post. (To be fair, part of the problem was that every time I had down time I was dozing off.) I finished two books on Saturday, however, and so I’m going to try my hardest to review them today and tomorrow. Here goes!
For those of you who don’t know, Dude Perfect was started by a group of five former roommates/friends from Texas A&M; they have a hugely popular YouTube channel involving trick shots, obscure world records, stereotype videos, and much, much more. They’re fun to watch–our whole family generally watches new videos together–and they’re fabulously clean, which means that my 11-year-old has literally grown up with them as one of her screen time options. One of their more current branching-out-in-a-new-direction adventures is a middle grade novel (apparently the start of a series), and it’s that novel I’m reviewing today.
Operation Trick Shot is the first ‘Dude Perfect + Panda’ book, and I’m undecided whether it’s going to have broad appeal beyond DP’s fan base. On the one hand, it’s a classic plot–good people banding together to save a community gym from closing due to debt–with a classic rich-and-unscrupulous-businessman sort of villain. On the other hand, DP is somehow already famous in middle school–making trick shot videos that include stunts like flying through the air in a harness–while still trying to figure out their nicknames and going through (in Tyler’s case) an epic missing-all-shots sort of slump. It’s farfetched in kind of a strange sort of way, you know? Of course, the audio is fun because each guy reads his own lines, and the book is illustrated, so its intended audience might not care about the oddness. If I run across a kid unfamiliar with DP who reads it, I’ll let you know!
In the meantime–thanks partly, I think, to meeting friends at back-to-school night–my youngest is feeling more positive about junior high than she was. I think my son’s okay with high school as well, but we’ll see how his B day goes today. And my senior is already stressed about homework…