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Summary
Summary
Twelve-year-old Tad is a blogger with a plan, in the book Jon Stewart calls "hilarious to anyone who ever went through, is currently in, might go to, or flunked out of middle school."
Tad has an agenda: Survive seventh grade. He also wants to: grow a mustache, get girls to notice him, and do a kickflip on his skateboard. But those are not the main reasons he started a blog. Tad just has a lot of important thoughts he wants to share with the world, like: Here is the first thing I have learned about having a dog in your house: Don't feed them nachos. Not ever.
This highly illustrated and hilarious book is by the Emmy® Award-winning former head writer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and is based on a column in MAD Magazine. Through a series of daily entries, readers are treated to a year in Tad's blog that will leave them in stitches.
MAD Magazine and all related characters and elements are trademarks of and © E.C. Publications. (s14)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-7-When Tad receives his father's old computer as a Christmas gift, he decides to start a blog. In his first post, he announces his New Year resolutions: to get through seventh grade, learn to do a kickflip on his skateboard, have girls notice him, and start to shave. What follows are the trials and tribulations of a year in the life of the Lakeville middle schooler, including a mystery to solve when someone leaves notes signed, "You're Secret Admirer" in his locker. He also has a way of complicating even the simplest situation. Humorous pencil illustrations accompany the riotous narrative. Fans of Jeff Kinney's "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series (Abrams) will find Tad's blog equally engaging.-Wayne R. Cherry, Jr., First Baptist Academy Library, Houston, TX (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Based on a column that Carvell, head writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, has written for Mad magazine since 2005, this episodic illustrated novel presents a year's worth of blog entries from Tad, an underachieving, none-too-popular kid in the vein of Wimpy Kid Greg Heffley. Without a narrative arc, the book's momentum comes from Carvell's distinctive sense of humor. While Tad's musings often feel like they've been pulled from the mind of a stoner at 2 a.m. rather than that of a 12-year-old boy ("You know what I bet would suck? If you died and went to heaven, but really hated harp music"), the target audience ought to find them hilarious. Amid familiar entries about family trips, a lawn-mowing business scheme, and a secret admirer, Tad watches a lot of TV, which lets Carvell riff on the pop culture pantheon, from Avatar (both the James Cameron and air-bending versions) to The Legend of Zelda. Holgate's cartoon spot art, not all seen by PW, is a good fit, underscoring the awesomeness of an eight-horned unicorn or the absurdity of Hannah Montana's "disguise." Ages 8-12. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Fictional blog entries (some that originally appeared in Mad magazine) span Tad's year of comical middle-school mishaps. Tad shares his thoughts on school, shaving, and other events. Filled with random quips ("tater tot is a bad name for a food, because it suggests that you're eating potato babies"), the book reads more like standup than story, but parts are very funny. Black-and-white cartoons illustrate the text. (c) Copyright 2012. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A phoned-in Diary of a Wimpy Kid wannabe from a Mad Magazine and Daily Show writer. Based on a blog of the same name that runs in Mad, the narrative is framed as nearly daily entries over the course of a calendar year by a middle-school Seinfeld. The content is entirely predictable. He skates on or over the edge of embarrassment while trying to be noticed by girls, generally comes out second best in dealings with his gifted little sister and briefly lands a summer job wearing a hot-dog suit. He joins several of his classmates in making a (wait for it) science-project volcano and records many similarly unexceptional experiences and encounters. These entries are thickly padded with a monotonous litany of callow opinions on dozens of cultural markers from various commercial mascots (including Ronald McDonald) to TV shows (Jeopardy, for example) and movies (Jurassic Park, among many others). These share space with complaints about minor annoyances like gum in water-fountain drains and superficially clever ruminations about why "werewolves" aren't called "arewolves," the nature of Santa's reindeer games and like burning topics. Moreover, he decides that his school mascot, movies about volcanoes, work and a mind-numbing catalog of other irritations all "suck." So does this tedious effort to climb aboard the bandwagon. (line drawings, mood icons) (Fiction. 10-12)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Cruising happily in the Wimpy Kid wake, this blog-entry novel from the head writer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart introduces 12-year-old Tad and everything he goes through over the course of a year spanning seventh and eighth grade. And what does he go through? Well, not all that much that's worth mentioning, but that doesn't keep him from jabbering on about whatever strikes his fancy. Tad is an observational humorist in the making, ruminating on such imponderables as: Why isn't the snooze button called the oversleep button? If you can be disgruntled, why can't you be gruntled? How is it that Batman ended up with both the Joker and the Riddler as enemies, and do they ever worry about stepping on each other's toes? And are there really so many Jabbas that he needs to be clarified as the Hutt? It's all fluff and little else, but there's nothing wrong with having a refined and often clever confectionery read for Tad's middle-school male cohorts. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This book is based on a blog from MAD magazine, so it already has plenty of built-in demand. A big marketing push will make sure it catches the eyes of kids who aren't already down with Tad.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IS Mad magazine dangerous? As a kid I thought so, reading every issue cover to cover in my local drugstore and then spending a significant portion of my allowance anyway because the owner once yelled at me for attempting a fold-in-and-run. I didn't mind: those issues were worth the $1.35 (cheap!) to bring home and parse talmudically, seeking to understand, at age 11, the parodies of "Tootsie" and "Aliens"; trying to glean some idea of adulthood from Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions; blissing out to ribald drawings of nearly unclothed ladies. Mad seemed so anarchic that I hid it from teachers who, I assumed, would cry "Potrzebie!" were they ever to discover I was smuggling .the Usual Gang of Idiots into my locker. It's unlikely any seventh-grade teacher today would bat an eye at "Planet Tad," a comic novel for middle schoolers based on Tim CarvelTs serialized story in the pages of modern-day Mad. This fundamentally sweet tale, with illustrations by Doug Holgate, is entirely unsubversive. It's charming and entertaining, to be sure. But I feel a little bit sad that a book with the Mad logo emblazoned on its cover can safely be handed by librarians to boys who might never appreciate the invigorating grossness of a Don Martin cartoon. The story follows its 12-year-old hero, Tad, as he starts a blog on New Year's Day, proclaiming his resolutions: 1) finish seventh grade 2) figure out how to do a kickflip on my skateboard 3) get girls to notice me 4) finally start shaving Tad isn't aiming for the stars, is what I'm saying. Carvell is clearly writing about an Everyboy, but there's a difference between being relatable and being forgettable. Tad has no real interests or passions, few close friends or enemies, not even a particularly fraught relationship with his parents. What does he have? A little sister who pushes him around. Teachers whom he unwittingly insults. Classmates who can't even remember his name. Tad most comes to life not when relating his day-today struggles, but in the short and sharp gags that interrupt the narrative. "Werewolves are badly named," Tad muses in one entry. "They're not people who were wolves. They're people who are wolves. They should be called arewolves." With a bit of judicious editing, this would be an excellent tweet. (Indeed, Carvell, the head writer for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," is a Twitter aficionado.) I wondered, in fact, why Tad hasn't embraced Twitter or Tumblr or some other microblogging service, rather than using what appears to be LiveJournal for his entries, complete with little mood emoticons garnishing each one. That's so 2007, Tad! It may seem churlish to complain about the platform a fictional character uses for his fictional blog posts, but the choice is of a piece with others in a book that only sometimes seems like the voice of an authentic 2012 seventh grader. An awful lot of Tad's jokes are about James Bond, The Legend of Zelda and other touchstones of my (and Carvell's) generation. I was willing to give Carvell some leeway for · those franchises and for "Star Wars," which still have some relevance for Kids These Days. But when Tad mentioned the TV show "Little House on the Prairie," I threw up my hands. Does Tad finally shave? Will girls notice him? Sure, in the sense that those things eventually happen to everyone. The advertising copy for "Planet Tad" boasts, " Move over, Wimpy Kid! ," but despite the appeal of this snappy book, I prefer Greg Heffley, the star of Jeff Kinney's wildly successful series by that name. Where Tad is genetically mischievous, Greg is selfish, crude and occasionally just plain bad - that is, much more like the middle schoolers I know. If they were in the same class, Greg would know Just what to do with a kid like Tad: slip him an old copy of Mad magazine and blow his mind. Dan Kois is a senior editor at Slate and a contributing writer for The Times Magazine. He is the author of "Facing Future," about the Hawaiian musician Israel Kamakawiwo'ole.