The Cheat

by Amy Goldman Koss

Overview

Award-winning author Amy Goldman Koss explores what happens when one bad decision threatens to destroy everything.

Cheating on a geography midterm is only the beginning. It seemed simple enough—they were given the answers from last year's test and they used them. But Sarah and her friends got caught, and what was done without much thought leads to greater and greater consequences. Now they are facing punishment at school, tension at home, and no one is sure how or when it will end.


"An excellent springboard to provocative discussion or debate about the moral and ethical questions that this issue raises."—School Library Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101658062
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	07/22/2004
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	339 KB
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

Amy Goldman Koss (amygoldmankoss.net) is the author of critically acclaimed novels The Girls, The Trouble with Zinny Weston, and How I Saved Hanukkah. Ms. Koss both wrote and illustrated Curious Creatures in Peculiar Places, a selection of the 1989 John Burroughs List of Outstanding Nature Books for Children, and Where Fish Go in Winter, a Book-of-the-Month Club Selection. She lives in Glendale, California, with her husband, two children, and many pets.

Read an Excerpt

When it all began, I had no idea anything was beginning. I just thought it was sweet that a guy I barely knew brought me the midterm answers out of the blue.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"An excellent springboard to provocative discussion or debate about the moral and ethical questions that this issue raises."—School Library Journal

Editorial Reviews

Although written in the same multinarrator format Koss used so powerfully in The Girls, this middle-school problem novel, unfortunately, doesn't make the grade. Hoping to impress pretty, popular Sarah, unpopular Jake gives her a copy of last year's multiple-choice geography midterm (from his older sister's files). Sarah shares the goods with her best friend, Katie, and impulsively, with Danny and Rob. At zero hour, Katie's conscience kicks in and she answers the questions out of sequence, so that she can't benefit from the mnemonic device she and Sarah invented to remember the answers. The other three, however, use the purloined answers; Rob realizes, too late, that the test has changed. Within a few hours, their teacher has somehow figured out that the students must have seen a previous exam, and Sarah, Danny and Rob are in trouble. This improbable setup occasions souped-up consequences, including (but not limited to) Rob's running away from home, Danny's girlfriend breaking up with him ("Who can trust a guy like that?... You can never know what else he'll, like, feel comfy lying about") and a crisis in Katie and Sarah's friendship. An artificiality permeates the characters' voices as well. Sarah is prone to cute versifying ("Whatever debatie/ No matter how weighty/ Or how irritatey/ I never could hatie/ My bestest friend Katie"); Rob speaks mainly in fragments. Koss's fans are likely to be disappointed. Ages 10-up. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Gr 6-8-Koss explores the ramifications of a school cheating scandal through the eyes of six students, who are involved in varying degrees. Some (Sarah, Dan, and Rob) cheat on their eighth-grade geography midterm and are caught outright. One (Katie) realizes that the answers she has been given couldn't possibly be correct, so she doesn't use them. Two (Jake and Ruby) are affected in more peripheral ways. In short, spare chapters, the narration bounces back and forth among the teens, and this device is confusing at times. As readers learn more about the characters' lives, the typical problems come to light-divorce, overbearing parents, etc. However, though the individual stories are not particularly unique or compelling, The Cheat does provide an excellent springboard to provocative discussion or debate about the moral and ethical questions that this issue raises.-Ronni Krasnow, New York Public Library Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Interlocking stories connect a group of eighth-grade students who get caught cheating on their geography midterm. Using the same narrative technique employed in The Girls, Koss tells this somewhat thinner tale in a medley of first-person voices. Sarah, a pretty, popular eighth grader, accepts the answers to last year's geography midterm from Jake, a smart kid "with a cool factor of zero" as casually as she would have taken "a stick of gum." But the situation has unintended consequences when Sarah and two friends she shared the answers with are sent home for cheating. Sadly, these rudderless adolescents have to cope alone as their parents are seen as being either self-centered, morally corrupt, or physically violent. What's intriguing and distressing about the piece is that while all the kids feel bad that they were caught-"Cheating is confusing, but getting caught is crystal clear"-there is no ethical consensus on cheating itself. Instead, the focus shifts to the morality of ratting out friends. And at the end of the story, Sarah, who refuses to tattle, and Jake, who finally confesses to the principal with the understanding that Sarah and the kids who rallied around her won't be punished, come out as heroes. Although provocative and disturbing, the characters lack richness and their stories don't build on each other to create a deeper whole, which is a shame because this contemporary, relevant topic is one that should invite discussion both in and out of the classroom. (Fiction. 10-14)

Kirkus Reviews

"An excellent springboard to provocative discussion or debate about the moral and ethical questions that this issue raises."—School Library Journal

"Provocative and disturbing."—Kirkus Reviews 

From the Publisher