It's a little.... unrealistic and strange, but a great bool. ( )

Mitty attends private high school in New York City and he is a serious procrastinator. His science teacher, Mr. Lynch, assigns the class a report regarding an infectious disease. Mitty waits the week before the paper is due, and then he finally begins his research on Variola Major a week before the paper is due. He breathes in smallpox scab dust after opening an envelope in an old medical textbook dated back to the early 1900s. He walks around New York City, and he does not know whether or not he has smallpox and whether or not he could infect the entire city with the deadly disease. I enjoyed the book because it captured my attention through Mitty's constant internal struggle about whether or not he actually has smallpox or not. One has to read it until the end, in order to find out the truth about whether or not he has smallpox. ( )

Walking around New York City was what Mitty Blake did best. He loved the city, and even after 9/11, he always felt safe. Mitty was a carefree guy–he didn’t worry about terrorists or blackouts or grades or anything, which is why he was late getting started on his Advanced Bio report.
Mitty does feel a little pressure to hand something in–if he doesn’t, he’ll be switched out of Advanced Bio, which would be unfortunate since Olivia’s in Advanced Bio. So he considers it good luck when he finds some old medical books in his family’s weekend house that focus on something he could write about. But when he discovers an old envelope with two scabs in one of the books, the report is no longer about the grade–it’s about life and death. His own.
It was a surprising book. I liked the ending. ( )

Mitty Blake is a junior at St. Raphael’s, a Manhattan prep school for the very smart or the very rich, in New York City. Mitty doesn't really care
about doing his schoolwork. He would rather listen to his iPod and roam the streets. But he must do a paper on small pox for biology class or he'll be kicked out of AP Biology, which means he won't get to see Olivia. While staying the weekend at his parent’s country home in Connecticut, Mitty discovers some very old medical texts and decides to use these for his research. While thumbing through the old text, he comes across an envelope containing scabs from the 1902 smallpox epidemic in Boston. After handling the scabs, it occurs to him that he could get smallpox from handling them, so he sends anonymous emails to various agencies to try to get some answers. The recipients get suspicious and forward the emails to the FBI. Before the FBI can find Mitty, a terrorist group that plans to use him as a biological weapon kidnaps him. Mitty is trapped and nobody knows where he is. Left alone, with nobody to rely on but himself, Mitty transforms from a laid-back slacker to an ingenious man of action. Some of the scenes are a bit difficult to believe, but the plot is faced paced, and it would be great for a reluctant reader. ( )

Cooney's characters are realistic and believable. Student comments about this book always include reference to the way she makes them feel about the main characters. ( )