Book Pitch : An Abundance of Katherines

Lexile Level : 890

Pages : 272

Grade Level : 6-8

Content Area : Math 
Awards : 2007 Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book, received recognition as one of American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults.

The book that I'd really like for you guys to chose for our book club is An Abundance of Katherines by John Green. Some of you may recognize the brilliant author, John Green, as he is also the author of the wildly popular novels Paper Towns and The Fault In Our Stars. In this other novel of his, a math-child-prodigy named Colin Singleton has a thing for girls named Katherine. The problem is, Katherines don't seem to have a thing for Colin. He's been dumped by 19 girls all sharing the name 'Katherine', spelled exactly the same way. Crazy, right? He thinks so too! So Colin decides to form "the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability," which is a theorem that will be able to predict the future of all of his relationships, transform him into a true genius, and finally win himself a girl! Love, friendship, and (apparently) a dead Astro-Hungarian archduke all add up to create this heart-warming story about reinventing oneself. This novel also incorporates several mathematical concepts and embodies the answer to the question: "when is math ever going to be relevant in real-life?" As a math-lover, this novel just seems really intriguing to me, and I would really love to read it within a book club. 

I think middle school students would also really enjoy this humorous novel, but to really test that, I actually asked some middle school students that I know for their opinons. I gave them a brief synopsis as well as read the first page to them.. and then they gave me their *honest* opinions about the book:




So please consider choosing my novel, An Abundance of Katherines by John Green... I promise you won't regret your choice! ;)

Emily 

Subjects Matter Chapter 9 Response

Chapter nine was dedicated to outlining how to hold the perfect Book Club. Book clubs can be a more entertaining way to get your students reading content-relevant texts of their choice. They’re also pretty cool in that they incorporate both collaborative learning and individual reading.

I’ve been in quite a few book clubs thought my school career, all of which took place in my language arts classes. I distinctly remember enjoying the book clubs that we had in my AP English class in my senior year. Because of the AP test, our goal for the class was to have as many classic novels and their main ideas, motifs, themes, etc. in our repertoires to be able to write about on the test. I recall our first clubs (there were only two clubs due to the small class) forming from our choice between reading either Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte or Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. I’ll be honest here: neither of those was particularly appealing to me. But most of my friends chose Pride and Prejudice so I joined in. Each week, we’d have to read a few chapters or so and use sticky notes to mark imagery, foreshadowing, or other literary elements. Then, we’d hang out and discuss with our group members about what we read. I distinctly recall how my group, of all girls, would discuss the cute moments between Elizabeth and Darcy, and also our frustrations with Lydia’s immaturity. We’d also spend a long time trying to decipher some of the odd, old rhetoric.  

Darcy and Elizabeth are #goals for sure 

My only beef with book clubs is that I don’t understand how they could work in a non-language arts classroom. They could probably work in a social studies classroom, but I just don’t see how I’d be able to fit a book club in or make a book club relevant to my math or science classrooms. I'm hoping that our upcoming book clubs using content-area texts will help me figure that out. 

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Emily