Turtle Boy will break your heart and mend it all in one reading. I fell in love with Will's tenacity and curiosity in the face of surviving his Bar Mitzva, saving the local nature preserve, making new friends, saying good-bye, and preparing for surgery. A must for fans of Wonder and an amazing read.

i really adored Will, our protagionist, who is going through a lot. Will's refuge is his bedroom with his turtles. Will’s passion for turtles is not the main reason he is teased at school and called Turtle Boy. Will has a mild facial disfigurement. He barely has a chin, making him look different which is just what the bullies thrive on...others differences and make them think he looks like a turtle.

Will’s family is Jewish, (love this aspect and the look into this religion) therefore his mom and Rabbi Harris pressure him to prepare for his Bar Mitzvah. He must complete a community service project. He is completely reluctant because he tries to veer away from any activity that draws attention to himself. After much reluctance, he is assigned to reach out to a dying teen named RJ. RJ lives in a hospital room and Will doesn’t like hospitals. They give him flashbacks to when his Dad died.

At first, the boys don’t get along, but then RJ shares his bucket list with Will. Here are some of the things he wants to do: get a pet, ride a roller coaster, go to a concert attend school dance and dance with a girl, and swim in the ocean. This concept is foreign to Will who only wants to stay in his room with the simple company of his turtles. RJ’s disease takes a negative turn and Will realizes he needs to tackle the bucket list on his new friend’s behalf before it’s too late. It seems like an impossible mission, and is WAY outside Will’s comfort zone. He completes each task with RJ’s guidance and Will begins to see that life is too short to live in a shell.

I found this book to be full of wisdom and humor.. I really enjoyed reading about the Jewish practices (I am Jewish myself, but have not been practicing until I was older so I never had a Bat Mitzvah) in this story.
I really think this was a great story, it dealt with a lot of things that kids Will's age might be going through and I really enjoyed watching Will become someone new while trying to help his new friend.


Thank you NetGalley and Random House Children and Delacorte Books for Young Readsrs for granting me permission to read this ARC. It’s a winner!

E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus



Will has always been self conscious about his receding chin, but middle school has heightened his anxiety, mainly because of the name calling of two bullies, who taunt him with "Turtle Boy". His mother has taken him to the doctor to check this out, and the diagnosis was micrognathia, which is concerning because it can lead to problems eating and breathing. There is a surgery for it, but Will is afraid because his father died during a routine hernia repair operation when Will was four. His mother is doing her best, but Will's insistence on keeping to himself is starting to cause more and more problems. He's alienated his best friend Shira, and struggling to get his community service hours before his bar mitzvah because he doesn't want anyone to look at him. Rabbi Harris steps in and takes him to the hospital to visit with RJ, a teen drummer who is dying due to mitochrondrial disease. Will doesn't want to be in a hospital, doesn't want to talk to RJ, and would rather stay at home with his collection of turtles that he has illegally removed from the school nature lab. Luckily, the adults in Will's life step in when he is not helping himself. A teacher lets him know that keeping wild turtles is illegal, and demands that he returns them. He returns all but one, an endangered Blandings turtle that was injured due to his negligence. Rabbi Harris makes him go visit RJ, and his mother schedules the chin surgery and makes him go to classmates' parties. Even faced with RJ's serious condition and relentless optimism, Will remains unhappy and closed off, but starts to slowly work on RJ's "bucket list" so he can share his experiences before RJ's health takes an inevitable turn. When the school's nature lab might be sold to developers, Will does use the rare turtle to try to save the land, and he manages to get through his bar mitzvahttp://msyinglingreads.blogspot.com/2017/06/mmgm-this-is-just-test.htmlh, where he finally comes to terms with the many issues in his life, and seems prepared to go forward.

Strengths: It's good to see a variety of physical conditions in middle grade literature; I've had several students over the years with micrognathia. Will's involvement with turtles is innovative, and I was glad to see that he consulted experts and was cautioned against taking animals from the wild. His interest in drumming, spurred on by RJ, is a good addition as well. The grief over the father's death is experienced very differently by the mother and Will, and their reactions and coping mechanisms are well portrayed. Books with cultural heritage also are good to see, and there aren't as many books about bar and bat mitzvahs as I would like. (Notable exceptions are Freedman's My Basmati Bat Mitzvah , Rosenberg and Shang's This is Just a Test, Perl's All Three Stooges, and Ben Izzy's Dreidel's on the Brain.)

Weaknesses: I found Will hard to like for most of the book, and his growth and insights come late in the book. Two of the main plots, gaining wisdom from someone who is dying and evil developers trying to take beloved land, have been done quite a bit, but this book does have the addition of the bar mitzvah and the physical condition, which helps.

What I really think: This has a blend of humor and Important Topics that will make it popular with teachers who like to use Sonnenblick's Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie or Benjamin's The Truth about Jellyfish for classroom novels or read alouds.

This was a wonderful book that reminded me of "Wonder". A young boy who is often teased for his appearance learns to open himself up to new experiences and people. He is able to learn about himself by doing things for others. This is a great book that would make a great recommendation for middle grade students and teachers.

A wonderful story of stepping out of your comfort zone. With all the angst of middle school, Will also must prepare for his Bar mitzvah, undergo a surgery to fix a malformed jaw, and complete 40 hours of community service which will introduce him to RJ. Readers 10 and older will love the character and conflicts in this story.

-sighs- I was pulled in by the concept of this book, but truthfully, it was a let down. And also extremely difficult to read; it made me uncomfortable, I didn't much feel like there was a difference in voices, be it the kids or the adults and regardless of gender. A lot of awkwardness and grimacing on my end. It sadly got to the point where I couldn't take any more, and though I pushed myself to get to exactly 50%, I had to stop. Because it was feeling more like a chore, and with my stress/anxiety/depression levels higher than normal, some reading sessions would accentuate that, triggering an almost dread, and that's never fair nor fun. I very much hope that this book resonates with others, that maybe it simply wasn't my jam, because again, the concept of befriending a terminally ill patient and finishing their Bucket List is a heartwarming and altruistic thing that *is* my cup of tea. Wolkenstein just didn't execute it correctly. HOWEVER, I very much appreciated the exposure to Jewish culture; *that* bit was well crafted.

Twelve-year-old Will is sad. His refuge is his bedroom with his turtles. Will’s passion for turtles is not the main reason he is teased at school and called Turtle Boy. Will has a mild facial disfigurement. He barely has a chin, making him look different which is just what the bullies thrive on...others differences.

Will’s family is Jewish, therefore his mom and Rabbi Harris pressure him to prepare for his bar mitzvah. He is completely reluctant because he veers away from any activity that draws attention to himself. In order to complete the contract of the bar mitzvah, Will must participate in a community-service project. He is assigned to reach out to a dying teen named RJ. RJ lives in a hospital room and Will doesn’t like hospitals. They give him flashbacks to when his Dad died. Will was 4 when his father went in for a simple hernia procedure and there was a complication. His father died.

At first, the boys don’t get along, but then RJ shares his bucket list with Will. Here are some of the things he wants to do: get a pet, ride a roller coaster, go to a concert attend school dance and dance with a girl, and swim in the ocean. This concept is foreign to Will who only wants to stay in his room with the simple company of his turtles. RJ’s disease takes a negative turn and Will realizes he needs to tackle the bucket list on his new friend’s behalf before it’s too late. It seems like an impossible mission, and is WAY outside Will’s comfort zone. He completes each task with RJ’s guidance and Will begins to see that life is too short to live in a shell.

There is a lot of wisdom in this book with some humor tossed in. I really enjoyed reading about the Jewish practices highlighted in the story. My review only touches of a tiny part of the events in the life of Will, making this a must read so you too can experience this marvelous debut novel.

The story is less about a boy being bullied and more about how he steps out of his comfort zone to help someone else and ending up helping his own self.

I predict Turtle Boy to be a big hit with middle and young adult readers. (Fiction. 10-14)

Thank you Random House Children and Delacorte Books for Young Readsrs for granting me permission to read this ARC. It’s a winner!

It’s not every day you read a book that’s like the last piece of cake.

Satisfying, yet maddening. Because you want more.

This book was adorable, and pleasant, and wonderfully heavily light. I understand if none of that makes sense to you. Let me explain:

I have never wanted to hug characters so much.

Will is adorable and wonderfully portrayed. Sometimes books with anxious or depressive characters are annoying, because they don’t show it as a personality trait. They show it s a consequence. In this case, I felt that Will was shown as having a nervous predisposition, and I deeply appreciated that. Mostly because I relate. Actually, my seventh grade self probably acted rather like Will.

I loved all of the characters, and how human everyone seemed. The Rabbi? Okay, he’s my hero. I love that dude. Shirah was cool. Max = wonderfully hyper.

I’m just going to applaud this book, and say I’ve been looking for one like it for a while.

I started this book thinking it was going to be a version of the book Wonder. And it was for a bit, the main character, Will, has a deformity with his chin, he gets teased for it, and needs surgery to correct it. Then as the book went along an environmental storyline about the Back 40, a nature area behind Will's school where he finds turtles popped up. Then I thought, oh this is more like the book Hoot. Then the storyline about Will's visits with hospital-bound RJ popped up and I realized this book is truly its own story. This is a wonderful coming of age story about a boy approaching his upcoming bar mitzvah. Will learns and grows as this book moves along and we learn and grow along with him.

I really enjoyed this book. I can't recommend it to my elementary school teachers as a read aloud because of a joke in the book playing with the word herp and herpes. Herpetology is the study of amphibians and Herb's Herps is the name of Will's favorite store to get his turtle supplies. And of course, it's funny -herps and herpes. But it would be awkward for an elementary school teacher to read aloud and in some cases, if students have opted out of family life education, it would be illegal. So, this lands the book square in middle and high school for me, which is not a bad thing. It's a great story, the main characters are teenagers and it will fit just fine. I guess I'm just a tad jealous because I wanted the book for my library in elementary school!