Mr. Cooper is out sick and the substitute who walks into third grade is Miss Daisy, who was A.J.’s second grade teacher and has not become any less strange since. She would rather the class ate bonbons all day than learned anything, and she has concluded that germs are personally out to get her. By the time the teachers arrive in full hazmat suits over a case of the sniffles, Ella Mentry School has given up pretending to be a normal school.

A.J. narrates, and his running position is that germs ought to be arrested and that know it all classmates deserve to have smartphones fall on their heads. HarperCollins aims the series squarely at the child who says books are boring: short chapters, and Jim Paillot’s cartoons breaking the text so a page never arrives as a wall of words.

Book five of My Weirdest School, Dan Gutman’s follow on series to My Weird School. Each one stands alone, so starting at number five costs a reader nothing.

Paperback, 112 pages, 5-3/16 by 7-5/8 in. HarperCollins, published 21 June 2016. ISBN 9780062284358. The publisher grades it for ages 6 to 10 and files it as a chapter book. Its own back cover states that more than 10 million My Weird School books have sold.

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