Dave Barry. The Worst Class Trip Ever. New York: Disney, 2015. Print.

I confess I have not entirely forgiven Dave Barry for giving up his newspaper column. His articles/stories/fairy tales were lots of fun. Many a Sunday they cheered me up. I once wrote him a letter, to which he kindly replied. Now he has come out with a YA book in the style which made him famous.

The Worst Class Trip Ever tells of Wyatt and Matt and a few other friends on their eighth grade class trip to Washington DC. The school where I teach took eighth graders to Washington for many years, and some years wild stories would circulate afterwards. This book looked like it could be fun. It was.

Wyatt tells the story. Right from the beginning we get a sense of what the story is going to be like. Eighth graders are canny. Some would argue that they are the smartest people in the world. But eighth graders also tend to be hyperactive and rarely consider the consequences of their actions. One teacher at my school said that if schools were smart, they would just give eighth graders a sabbatical. It is about time they had one anyhow.

Wyatt tells us right at the beginning:

Don’t get me wrong: Matt is my best friend. But he can be an idiot. But when we were in kindergarten, pretty much all the boys were idiots, so he did not stand out so much, and we became best friends. So now, even though we’re in eighth grade, and he’s sometimes unbelievably annoying, I’m kind of stuck with him.(3)

Another friend is Cameron, a boy whose personal hygiene is erratic and who has the enviable skill (at least to eighth grade boys) of being able to pass gas on demand. Yeah, and Wyatt has a crush on the beautiful Suzana, who, like most eighth grade girls, is a head taller than the boys, so she goes out with one of the few tall boys in the class.

(I recall one year an opposing coach challenged our school’s junior high girls’ basketball team. He claimed that the girls were too tall to be in junior high—the opposite of Chinese gymnastics, I guess. But all the girls were indeed in seventh or eighth grade.)

The eighth grade boys, of course, can’t stay still or keep their mouths shut on the airplane and pretty soon find themselves at odds with a couple of foreigners on the same flight from Miami to Washington. One is a big, burly guy with tattooed arms. His companion is a slight, long-haired man with a very unusual-looking electronic device. The boys’ imaginations go wild, and they begin to think these guys are terrorists.

The story gets wilder and funnier. Dave Barry does have a highly developed sense of humor. As the story comes to a climax, though, it is almost like something from Tony Abbot’s Danger Guys stories—breathless action that is barely believable but quite entertaining.

Some of the humor is straight from a textbook on how to be an eighth grader. A friend is not on the bus? When the teacher is doing the head count, ask for help in opening a window. While the teacher is helping, have someone in front sneak to the back. He gets counted twice, but the teacher thinks everyone is on board.

Only someone in middle school would think that a cigarette lighter shaped like a pistol is a cool souvenir. How will they get it past airport security? Well, they don’t, but…

Lots of fun. Especially if you know eighth graders. Love them or hate them, the world would be a perfect place if it were ruled by them.