Family Book Club: Okay for Now

We finished reading Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt for our family book club. It is a companion novel to The Wednesday Wars where it takes the "bully" in TWW and shows you what happens when he moves to Maryvale, NY the summer after 7th grade. Doug does a lot of growing up and experiences some pretty tough things throughout the book. It's a really well written book and I loved the characters. Doug's father is not a great guy but Doug ends up finding a lot of  positive male role models that he can look up to. He discovers new talents, learns how to be a good friend, has a special bond with his mom, tries to connect people to others who need them, and makes a lot of personal growth. It's also very funny. For our book club we learned a little bit more about the moon landing, played a Kahoot quiz on the book, and colored John James Audubon birds. Audubon is an important figure throughout the book as Doug learns to draw with the help of Mr. Powell. The birds are very symbolic to what is going on in Doug's life at that moment. The kids picked a book out of the coloring book I bought and used their Ipads to look up the real birds so they could mimic the colors.

For our treat the kids each got their own pint of ice cream! We've never let them have that much before so they were pretty excited. In the book Mrs. Windermere orders a different kind of ice cream each week (Doug delivers her groceries on Saturdays) so we had to have lots of different flavors.

This was a great book and a fun book club. I was very happy with how it turned out. We've now started reading The Thief which is one of my favorite books....okay fine, they're all my favorites!