Chapter Eighty: The View from Saturday

The View from Saturday is a Newbery Medal winning (in 1997) novel by E.L. Konigsburg.  I know I've read it once before, probably twelve or thirteen years ago, but I didn't remember much about it except that I thought it was pretty darn cool that other time I read it and that I really wanted to be like the kids in it.  Then I happened across a copy, so I figured I'd give it another go.  While The View from Saturday is not quite as cool as I remember it being, I still enjoyed reading it.  Structurally, it's an odd story, alternating between the present (always narrated by Mrs. Olinski, a paraplegic 6th grade teacher and the book's adult-protagonist) and a moment in the (recent) past of each of the four child-protagonists (Noah, Nadia, Ethan, and Julian), narrated by each child in turn.  It's really not clear at the beginning how these snippets of various pasts are pertinent to the present (the state championships of the academic bowl in New York state), but it all does come together by the novel's end.  We don't get to find out as much about Mrs. Olinski as I might like to know, though.  Still, the messages of the book (help each other, be kind to each other, be who you are) are always ones that need to be heard.  It's a cute, quick read.