Can you write an entire book about a girl giving an oral report in school on Ethan Allen? Well, yes and no.
This was quite an uneven book. The best parts were laugh out loud funny, clever, and built around an interesting cast of characters. I'd give 2/3 of the book five stars.
Tessie LeClerc is a 6th grade student in Vermont in 1966. She's always been a C student, but she ends up being assigned the coveted report on Ethan Allen for her oral report on Vermont history. She ends up reporting on everything about the hero of the state that teachers don't want impressionable young minds to hear about. And that's funny. Her farmer father, who has an odd manner of speaking, him, and only third grade education is quite the character, livening up any episode he is in.
But as the book goes along, Tessie has to report more and more on Ethan Allen, and especially in the last third of the book, we have long, unfunny stretches that seem to be mostly direct quotes from Ethan Allen's autobiography. And by long, I mean pages and pages in a row. It becomes rather boring towards the end.
And one little episode seemed wildly inappropriate for a middle readers book to me. The LeClerc family is regularly harassed by a neighbor's vicious dog. Seriously vicious. Dangerous. Tessie's father rants occasionally about how he should kill that dog. Well, when the dog in about to attack his daughter's friend, he does kill it. With a shovel. Brutally. And yes, if a dog was about to maul a child and I had a shovel, I'd do the same thing, but I'd have been more comfortable if the whole dog part of the story had been omitted entirely. It wasn't essential to the plot.
Halfway through reading this, I thought I'd be highly recommending it, but by the end, I can only give it a lukewarm review. ( )

This story seems very realistic and current. Students could easily identify with Tessy and her classmates. The author describes Tessy in a way in which the reader really gets to know her. We can see how she changes throughout the book and learns a lot about herself, her family, and her real friends. Tessy is a round character who we get to see both at school and at home and really feel as though we are her struggling through the sixth grade with her. ( )