Bucket and Friends Save (Part Of) the World with a Wall

Description: A kid named Bucket and their friends find a way to turn a "sad wall" at their school into a place of comfort and support.

Brief description: Tom Rademacher has spent the last two decades devoted to students and education as an award-winning teacher and acquisitions editor. As an editor, he acquires, develops, and sometimes writes books with the goal of helping do the hard work of teaching well. He's the author of 50 Strategies for Learning without Screens, It Won't Be Easy, and Raising Ollie and has written for Huffington Post, Education Post, City Pages, and more. As a teacher, Tom was named Minnesota's 2014 Teacher of the Year, spoke at national conferences and TEDx events, and was interviewed by the BBC, Associated Press, and Education Week. Before that, he mostly wrote bad poetry and talked about Kurt Cobain. He lives too close to the Mall of America in Minnesota with his wife, son, and absolute chonk of a dog.

Review Quotes: A kid named Bucket stars in this cheery series by Tom Rademacher, illustrated by Esther Hernando (Stone Arch), about taking action to make positive changes, big or small. The stories are told in engaging, first-person, stream-of-consciousness narratives, whose often-breathless sentences reflect Bucket's personality. "I'm not always good at staying focused," Bucket tells us--and readers who feel similarly may see themselves reflected. Even if one has to hang on through Bucket's frequent tangents, though, all readers should appreciate their irrepressible personality and kind heart. Bucket's nonbinary identity is mostly incidental to the plots, though it comes up briefly in one scene in the third volume, when they are happy to meet a teacher who is also nonbinary, "like me." In an introduction common to all volumes, however, after Bucket introduces themself and their friends, they explain that they use "they" and "them" pronouns, which "fit lots better" than "he" or "she." One friend, they note, "used to struggle" with using "they," but because she "would just fix it and move on and not make a big deal about it," Bucket was okay with that (and the friend eventually always got it right). It's a clear teaching moment, but remains separate from the main stories. Backmatter includes Author's Notes that further expand each volume's themes, Questions for Readers, and related activities for solo readers and groups.--Dana Rudolph "Mombian"