Leon is going into the fourth grade, nervous and scared. He meets his friends there which are P.W, and Lily-Matisse. They end up meeting their fourth grade teacher, Ms.Hagmeyer. They call her the Hag because, well she really is a Hag. Ms. Hagmeyer is obsessed with sewing and even has a threatening needle she uses to point at students. It ends up that Leon is falling behind in her class, she is mean and does not know how to teach regular circular subjects. Leon is very bad in sewing and eventually gets sent to the principal for falling behind. His friends notice something fishy about Ms.Hagmeyer. They notice that every time that they make a project that they have sewn, it gets thrown in a medal box, which she takes to her car for some odd reason. Lily-Matisse's mom is an art teacher at the school and she over heard Ms. Hagmeyer telling other teachers that she will take these projects and send them. Lily-Matisse told her two friends and they thought that she sells the sewing projects for money. They calculated it out and if she sells each project for 5 bucks she would have a thousand by the end of the ear. Leon and his friends try to figure out something until Leon has to make a master piece, and makes one of his teacher, Ms.Hagmeyer. He eventually notices that when he moves the doll, so does Ms. Hagmeyer.

My opinion about this book is it was very slow. It took the author to get to the point, basically in the middle of the book. Allen Kurzweil had a good idea to put the main idea in, but really didn't get to that point. This frustrated me a lot, when I was expecting an unanimous action, nothing happened in this book at all. On the good side of this book I thought it was a very good idea by the author to put in creativity when Leon find out that he can control his teacher with a doll. ( )

Leon, a fourth grader at The Ethical School, tries to outwit the school bully and learn to sew for fanatical teacher Miss Cronheim, with unexpected help from his final project-- a doll with magical powers.
Lexile: 690 [view chart]

Leon, a fourth grader at The Ethical School, tries to outwit the school bully and learn to sew for fanatical teacher Miss Cronheim, with unexpected help from his final project-- a doll with magical powers.

It was a little long and about halfway through the book I thought "Okay, the problem is solved so, what is the next half of the book about?" It was very good though. ( )