Stuck

A fascinating T&YA tale on bullying. Jackson is so terrified of the bully across the street that he wishes to never grow up. After years stuck as an eleven-year-old, he grows tired of it. Unfortunately, nothing he does seems to end his nightmare.While informative, the story ends tragically, as the lessons learned are forgotten. Still, it is a good story as the listener can recall them.Easy-to-read. Entertaining. Great world building. Romantic. Tragic. Unpredictable. Whimsical. Wonderful characters.

I wasn’t exactly sure in which direction the plot was going to take me, but as I got deeper into the story…it grew on me.I loved how the author showed the struggles of growing up from a pre-teen perspective. There are several lessons to be learned throughout.Basically, actions have consequences; the author was able to convey this theme and eventually a completed solution is presented.The book is mainly a story geared towards a younger age category, but as an adult, I enjoyed it on my own.Audible: The story presented as more of a radio station drama, than the usual one narrator format. The actors were awesome, give or take a few failing moments with the various types of verbal accents.

A very short middle-grade read about an 11-year old boy named Jackson who doesn’t want to grow up, and who makes a wish (but more importantly he later realizes, whose grandfather makes a wish for him) that he would always stay 11. He gets the wish, but (in “It’s a Wonderful Life” fashion), this of course turns out to be a curse, as he repeats 5th grade… for 10 years. Everyone else around him isn’t stuck though, so he has to watch the world move on without him. The explanation for all of this involved astral planes and what-not, but it’s pretty much like waving magic wands.I actually got more engaged in the story as it went on–each time Jackson thought he’d figured out the key to break the curse and end the cycle, I felt so disheartened for him (more than he seemed to be himself). How he finally did break the curse was (spoiler alert kind of, though you can probably guess it) about learning to put others before himself. This was a little cheesy and didn’t totally fit with the rest of the story, since it wasn’t like Jackson was an especially self-centered kid to begin with. But man, I was glad for him when he got off the merry-go-round!My rating: ****Language: noneViolence: noneSexual content: nonePolitical content: none

While this book, overall, was just fine, the biggest issue I had while reading was realizing that this is basically a retelling of the plot of the movie GROUNDHOG DAY. The reason that's significant is because the movie basically already tackled this premise perfectly, which meant that as I was reading I was comparing it against basically flawless execution of the same premise, and this story unfortunately came up a little lacking.Ultimately, I didn't feel much of a connection to the characters, especially the protagonist, throughout. The mechanism by which he wishes to never grow old and the way in which that wish is realized was pretty well thought out and interesting, but it was hard to get invested in the character's plight, and the supplemental characters weren't very well developed at all. In addition, there were several moments that required an enormous suspension of disbelief to buy into, such as his enemy being held back multiple times in order to always give him an antagonist to fight in the same grade.Overall, this wasn't a bad story by any means, but it was told better as GROUNDHOG DAY.