Me and Dad vs Everybody

Jaylen is eight years old, he's in the third grade, and he lives in Apartment 3B with his dad. He is an expert on exactly three things: rocks (he has forty-seven, and he knows what every single one is called), spiders (which are NOT bugs, and he will explain why), and his black, shiny guinea pig, Obsidian. He doesn't talk much, not to people he doesn't know. Dad says he's "slow to warm up," like a toaster oven.

Dad, on the other hand, never stops talking. He tells jokes at breakfast, jokes in the car, and jokes at bedtime, and Jaylen rates every single one out of ten. The highest score Dad has ever gotten is a four. For as long as Jaylen can remember, it's been the two of them against the world, with a motto they say every night: Me and Dad vs. Everybody.

But everybody keeps knocking.

Across the hall in 3C lives Bella, a five-year-old with a lot of hair, a lot of volume, and a peephole she watches all morning so she can ambush Jaylen on his way to the bus. Her big sister Maya is Jaylen's best friend, a loud, fearless, goggle-wearing chemistry fan who never met an experiment she didn't want to make bigger. Their mom, Miss Tasha, is the only person in the building who can out-joke Dad, and she always seems to show up right when he's in over his head. Then there's Tyler, the know-it-all who sits behind Jaylen in class, and Mr. Kowalski, the grumpy building manager with a sign for everything.

Over one very loud school year, Jaylen survives a cricket prank that backfires spectacularly, a soccer snack disaster involving sardines and prune juice, a runaway guinea pig, Picture Day hair gone wrong, a frozen Thanksgiving turkey, a blackout that traps someone in the elevator, and the smallest Christmas tree in the building. And looming over all of it is the school science fair, where Jaylen will have to do the one thing he's worst at: talk. Out loud. To strangers with clipboards.

Funny, warm, and full of heart, Me and Dad vs. Everybody is a story about a quiet kid discovering he has plenty to say, a single dad doing his very best, and the neighbors across the hall who slowly turn into family. It's perfect for readers ages 8 to 12, for reading aloud together at bedtime, and for fans of Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Beverly Cleary's Ramona books.