One doesn’t need to attend a wizarding school to do magic. In Susan Haas and Lexi Haas’ book “Fooled”, Lil Evers and her friends Scoot, Dora, Benny and Eva prove that magic is just believing. Believing in oneself, believing in the goodness of others, believing that one can impact change. The “Exceptional Children’s” (EC) program is for special needs kids who need help in various way to succeed. Unfortunately some want these EC kids to be stuffed away in a room out of the way. Lil and her friends advocate for themselves so they can participate in various activities as fully as they are able. In this process the other students find that the EC kids are just as capable as the General Ed kids. And the magic begins to happen.

This book helps all of us understand the special needs of all children. The authors, a mother and a special needs daughter, have done a great job of presenting the various situations that a special needs person encounters and how these situations can be addressed. I would love to see this book developed into a series that can help all of us be aware of and work with special needs people. This book is written for a middle school young reader and I think that it would also have value for adults as well.

I want to thank Little, Brown Books for Young Readers for the complimentary eARC of this book and for selecting me to review it on NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

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I'm so happy I was able to get an ARC of "Fooled" thanks to Netgalley. I'd seriously been refreshing it every so often, waiting to see Fooled pop up after I saw Susan and Lexi speak at the National Book Festival in DC last year. Fear not! The magical authorship duo is BACK!

I adored this book and read it incredibly quickly; it was so spellbinding! Lil, Benny, Dora, and Scoot are all in the EC classroom for Exceptional Children, or what other schools might call "special education". Students that might need help succeeding in a variety of ways are placed in the EC classroom, and mostly left to their own devices. I loved Lil and her friends' idea to make their OWN magic school, especially after the recent disaster that is that OTHER famous magic school, and some of the author's more exclusionary views. See, the EC classroom and the students in it are treated less-than by the other Gen Ed students and more separate than equal thanks to the Safety First Initiative.

That is, until Catchin' Charms. Now, I won't spoil everything, I'll just tell you the charms and their magic catch on around the school and the town faster than you can say "abracadabra"!

I greatly appreciated the inclusion of various types of disabilities, a variety of views on growing up alongside children with disabilities, and a brand new group of wizards and magicians to cheer for! Lexi and Susan Haas never disappoint! This book includes different perspectives on growing up disabled or around someone who is, from the parents trying to help their child succeed, to schools doing what they can, to the town not fully understanding, and so many others. I'm thankful for the Authors Note at the end talking about the use of the term "fool" throughout history and how it has evolved over time, and more information about glass children, the typical siblings of disabled children that are not seen, rather, seen through. Often these glass children are overlooked and villified because they don't love their disabled sibling 100% of the time, but does anyone love their sibling all the time?? I don't think so.

Lastly, abundant thanks to Lexi and Susan for giving ME something magical to believe in, too. 100% would tattoo these stars on my body without hesitation (if I was medically cleared). I can't wait to see this book spread like the Catchin' Charms!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was a fun middle grade novel. This story was very well done and will be enjoyed by kids and will be very impactful to them.

When I was in school, in the dark ages, children who were disabled didn’t have a right to education. If they came to school at all, they were kept away from the main stream kids.


Apparently the guarantee of a free public school education didn’t become a law until President Geral Ford signed it into law in 1975. But, as the author’s note, at the end of Fooled states, just because it became law didn’t mean that all the schools started acting accordingly.


In Fooled, Lil, the main character has MS, and has a wheel chair to get her around, as well as a text to speech computer. She can speak, but it is very hard and slow. She wants to go to college. She wants to learn, but she has been put into an Exceptional Children’s class, along with Scoot, who is neurodivergent, and loves to tinker, and two other children, one who can’t talk, but can sing, and a girl who loves to jump and cheer. However, the vice principal doesn’t want to mainstream the kids, and forbids them from doing extra curricular activities.


But Lil doesn’t take no for an answer, and fights to get everyone in the after school classes that suit them best.


What I really like about this story, other than the daughter of the mother daughter trio, is disabled, so knows how people like her are treated, is that the class president, Eva, isn’t a mean girl, the way so many middle school stories like to do to popular girls. When Lil asks her about that, later in the book, she has an excellent response. “Yeah, maybe they talk better, but talk is all they do. They never stop to think or listen. You and the other ECs don’t waste your time trying to convince everyone around you how great you are. You just do you.”


Loved this book. Hopefully a lot of kids out there will love it as well. And oh, yes, Lil really wants to go to a magic school, when the story starts, but gradually realizes that remaining the in the real world is where she really wants to be.


Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review. This book is being published on the 21st of October 2025.