Family Fun: Nerd Camp

For our March family book club, I picked a Cybils finalist that I had lent P to read on an airplane trip; he much prefers books he has just finished so as to avoid the tormenting suspense of having to read a book. Since X and I easily finish any book on the list we tend to pamper his sensitivities.  So I moved Elissa Weissman's Nerd Camp further up my pile of Cybils finalists (it's a Middle Grade Fiction entry) and then X gobbled it up happily the day after I finished it.  And so it was time for sushi.

The slowest part of the conversation was the lack of controversy -- we all agreed on almost everything. It was a fun book, nerds can have cool fun, and the camp sounds awesome although P thought it would be more fun if X came too, even if they were in different cabins. We kept getting sidetracked into nerdy investigations -- what kind of snake was the Milk Snake that saved Gabe's bacon? How useful is a head-held flashlight, and who was the last one to see X's? How many digits of pi should an educated person know, and does that mean my fifth grader is more educated than me?
It's a fun book for a family, although I do wish A had tried it, as she knows more about the "cool" stuff represented by Gabe's stepbrother, and so could advise us on how plausible the finale was. Thanks, Weissman, for writing a book that gave us a delightful family book club night.