This was a lot of fun to read, with vivid characters from Alvin himself to his extended family to his fascinating classmates. Honestly, I'm a little jealous of Alvin, because as a kid I wanted an older brother and to be a middle child ... though I was a pretty social second grader, so I can't imagine how debilitating the performance anxiety / selective mutism must be, especially at an age where children already feel like they don't have a lot of say in their lives.

But having worked with elementary school students for years, I feel like Alvin and his friends don't quite come across as kids so much as how older people — i.e., teenagers and up — tend to think of kids. There are quite a few jokes that play on how literal-minded and naive he is (not in a mocking way necessarily, more of an "aw how precious, please never grow up") but at the same time, he uses several turns of phrase that I certainly wouldn't have understood at that age even though I read a lot and my parents spoke relatively fluent English. I also don't love the internalized sexism ("Rule #1 of being a gentleman is you can't hit girls"; girls can't punch ... though this assumption is proven wrong!) even though it's something that I unfortunately do see in my first graders, if not to the extent that Alvin carries it. And some of the actions Alvin takes, while they do convey believably childlike thoughtlessness and lack of general awareness of others, are a little hard to believe when he seems like the kind of kid who would mostly follow the rules and principles he was taught by the adults in his life.

Also, the ending was really frustrating. I'm not sure if it was meant to be a cliffhanger, because I'm sure the situation feels like a big deal to Alvin (though it seems fairly trivial to me, having more life experience and having seen some of the other scrapes he's gotten himself into), but it felt like the book just ended abruptly. Which unfortunately doesn't really make me want to continue the series.