Louis Sachar

There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom

By: Louis Sachar

Response By: Charles-Alexandre Côté

“AHHH”. It’s not always fun when there is a boy in the girls’ bathroom.  This review will tell you a dense response of this goofy story by Louis Sachar.

This story is about a boy in 5^th grade called Bradley Chalkers.  He has difficulties in school and doesn’t make an effort.  He has no friends because of that.   One day a councillor comes to his school and helps him become good and teaches him how to do efforts.   At the end of the book, he starts doing his homework but he rips it before handing it in.  Then he does homework and he rips it but his councillor gives it to his teacher.

The Story in a Story

A good feature I found in my book was the words of a book in a book.  There were paragraphs of a book called “My parents didn’t steal an elephant” that Bradley read.  When he was reading, he related to the story so the words helped us understand.   There was also a lot of humour. For example, «Everyone got their map out, so did Bradley.  But his map was different.  He had Europe on Canada and Mexico in France.  So he cut it out and put it in U.S.A at the right place.  Bradley was a good cutter.  He cut exactly the black lines.”

Main Characters

“Chalkers.  Stop right now!” Bradley Chalkers is a young boy in grade 5 who always gets into trouble...in the past.  Except he turns out to be very good inside and his councillor helps him show people that he is good on the outside too.  Carla Davis:  A very fine young woman who applied as a councillor at Bradley’s school.  She doesn’t believe in accidents and thinks everything has a reason.

The inside

I think the message of the book is that if someone has difficulty in school, they should be respected equally.  They are just the same as everybody.  All people have difficulties in certain things so really we’re the same.  In the book, Bradley doesn’t do his homework and does not listen in school but he is a nice boy.  He tries to make friends but they reject him like a loser.

How many of you have judged a class mate by his school results?

Oups...

I have a little connection to when Bradley was running and hid in the girls’ bathroom. We were in the M&M store in New York when I had to go to the washroom.  The bathroom labels were M&M characters.  Both looked like boy M&Ms so I went in one of them and it was the girls’ bathroom.  I was lucky there was no one in there!

My Opinion

My opinion of the book is that it makes kids and children understand that judging people by their grades is bad.  It’s smart of the author to pass this message.  It’s also a book full of humour.  The author was probably a humoristic man.  I rate this book 5 stars for its good message and the humour it contains.

In “There’s a boy in the girls’ bathroom” book, I focused on predicting.  At each chapter I would try to predict what would happen, but the author kept surprising me.  It was as if he was reading my mind and doing the opposite.  It made my reading more interesting and at the same time suspenseful.

I think it was a good book and I’d like to read more books about this author.