Book Review: The Very Principled Maggie Mayfield | Kathy Cooperman

A quirky and adorable romp, I am captivated and delighted by The Very Principled Maggie Mayfield. Grab yourself a box of your favorite chocolates and take the day off to read this one—you will be charmed by Maggie and the gang!! With a refreshing mix of social conscience some cuckoo twists, this one had me laughing along the whole way. I think readers will adore Maggie as much as I did!

About the Book

Maggie Mayfield is the principal of a San Diego elementary school. The community has recently fallen on some hard times, and many families are relying on Maggie’s school more than ever to help their kids learn and grow. When budget cuts loom, Maggie fears that she’ll have to lose some important teachers and classes in science, art, and P.E.

So when for-profit education firm Edutek offers Maggie enough funding to cover her STEAM budget needs for the next five years, in exchange for beta testing their new math curriculum software, Maggie feels the offer is too good to pass up. And it doesn’t hurt that the CEO Danny Z is hot hot hot, and could charm the smile off the school’s worm mascot!

But sometimes things seem to good to be true because they are, and Maggie soon finds out something about the MathPal software that makes her question whether she should have allowed her school to participate at all. Now Maggie and her fearless friend and colleague Diane will have to get a little bad to do some good. And it may involve breaking all of the rules!

Reflection

Kathy Cooperman starts this book off with a letter to the reader written by none other than best friend (and co-conspirator) Diane. In the letter, Diane pleads with the reader to not judge Maggie to harshly. She thought she was doing good, after all. I absolutely loved this opening to the book! It drew me right in and showed that level of humor that Cooperman excelled at throughout the book.

Maggie Mayfield is a hoot! She’s a mix of stern, loving, kooky, relatable, and fierce. She’s a woman who can fix a vomit stain on an evening gown, recover from a sex scandal, and wrangle a few curious kids away from a playground snake without batting an eye. Maggie is the sort of person that you can’t help but love. I wanted to be friends with her! And yes, at times I wanted to use that friendship to give her a loving smack on the head after some poor choices (but luckily we had Diane there to do that for us)!

And then we have some chapters narrated by Lucy Wong, a third grader at Maggie’s school who suffers from challenges making friends and living up to her mother’s academic expectations. Lucy is the smartest girl in her grade, but sometimes that means she has trouble relating to others. I found Lucy’s chapters charming, seeing how a third grader reacts to the social dynamics around her was adorable and made me think about how kids pick up on so much more than we give them credit for. Lucy’s story stole my heart!

The actual plot surrounding the educational software and the way for-profit education companies pray on not only the districts who want to help children, but the kids themselves—well it was a bit too real to laugh at. I worked in education research before this and you would be shocked by the number of companies that make money off of educational “research” on kids at school. Those schools are like a glorified rat lab with experiments deemed to have benefit to the kids skewing data to make theirs look like the technology or intervention that made the difference. I will get off of my soapbox before you all stop reading, but suffice it to say this book could completely happen in real life (and it does happen, at school districts all over our country).

Cooperman did a fantastic job with the plot here. I completely understood Maggie’s difficult position, and I empathized with her decisions. Maggie didn’t make a single decision in the book lightly. Those kids and their futures meant everything to Maggie!

And then we have the truth coming out. I can’t spoil it by suffice it to say the end of this book was wild, wacky, and positively delightful! It swung all the way out there for the grand finale, and it made me whoop with delight when I read it! There is no way going in I expected THAT ending, so let’s just say every moment until the very last page made this book completely worth it!

Thank you so much to the team at Amazon Publishing and Lake Union for my copy to review.