Gentle, persistent good humor underlies every important interaction. Families pass on important concepts and skills for constructing a rich and civilized life. Smart kids find friends who are diverse, playful, deeply affectionate, and helpfully engaged in the problems of each other’s lives. The school honors, cultivates and challenges intelligence. This is, quite simply, a picture of gifted kids’ heaven. The moon in this book shines very brightly, indeed. How can people have adequate days if they don’t know what moon to shoot for? I can’t see how it hurts to flesh out an ideal vision, a perfect day. It is very rare that a book– for any age person – pictures what smart people might really want, as their absolute best outcome. There are plenty of books that prepare people for sadness, for a good enough life, for getting by. Perhaps young adults should be prepared for that. Lots of lives don’t have triumphs good work doesn’t always lead to splendid results. I suppose one might be suspicious of a book about a triumph. It turns out that the quiz bowl victory is just one small dimension of the day’s triumph, and we are expected to see the full range of goodness in this very good day, to appreciate the many ways in which it completes the work and satisfies the deepest yearnings of the children and adults involved in the story: four children, their teacher, and some of the children’s family. Later, we understand that we have another job as well. The story begins on a triumphant Saturday, and our job – we are immediately given a job, by this author – is to understand how this unexpected triumph – the victory of the sixth grade team in the regional quiz bowl – came about. The title is the name of the book’s first and biggest puzzle. It’s a surprisingly successful strategy one finds oneself trying to live up to the book’s high expectations and outrageous demands, and to the intellectual rigor that shines through on every page.
She is a monstrous optimist: she just expects that the reader, like her characters, enjoys thinking, is always looking for a puzzle or a problem, a thing to think about, in every corner of the world. Konigsburg uses every word and detail in her book, The View from Saturday to provoke the reader into thinking. Originally published in Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 19(4): 1.Į.L. Konigsburg (New York: Atheneum Books, 1996).
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