The Secret of the Fortune Wookiee

How can you have one of Tom Angleberger’s delightful Origami Yoda books without Dwight Tharp — or especially Origami Yoda? Genius that he is, Angleberger found a way!

The thus-far irrepressible Dwight has been expelled from McQuarrie Middle School and is now at Tibbet Academy, leaving Tommy Lomax and the gang behind. Adrift without the Jedi wisdom, the seventh-graders turn to the Fortune Wookiee, a substitute Dwight has given his neighbor Sarah Bolt. The Fortune Wookiee can’t speak himself, but his yelps and howls are translated by Hans Foldo, yet another puppet. The Fortune Wookiee’s advice is nearly as good as Origami Yoda’s, but McQuarrie’s dark-side Harvey is as skeptical as ever of the Force.

Meanwhile, Dwight, who once show more marched to his own drummer, has become “normal” — alarming his McQuarrie friends, especially his best friends Tommy, Sarah, and sort-of-girlfriend Caroline Broom. He no longer turns to Origami Yoda, says “purple,” or even speaks much at all. Can Dwight really be happy with his new persona?

So for the third time, Tommy compiles a collection of case studies to try to make sense of all of these changes, and the result — The Secret of the Fortune Wookiee — is just as charming, touching, and, as Kellen Campbell would phrase it, Jedi-wise as the two previous books, The Strange Case of Origami Yoda and Darth Paper Strikes Back. While aimed squarely at the middle-grade and middle-school sets, any adult who doesn’t enjoy The Secret of the Fortune Wookiee just doesn’t remember the rollercoaster emotions of seventh grade. Once again, I was lucky enough to listen to the audiobook, with its perfect cast of narrators, which proved to be the icing on a most delicious cake. show less

Such a fun series. It focuses on the theme of empathy, but there's plenty of gross humor and a variety of characters to appeal to a variety of readers. Book five is the best, imo, because it gets really wise, as the kids learn that adults are people too. Book six is odd - like someone got called in from the bench to write it for Tom. But if you don't stop after book one, you'll want to read them all, and to do so in order. (This review copied to all.)

I started this one not realizing there would be another one to follow! Angleberger set up the best cliffhanger of the three books so far in this series, and I don't even care that the end is a fairly heavy-handed commentary on Common Core/High Stakes Testing (which I happen to despise...the testing, not the commentary).

I laughed out loud so much while reading this that my students started to get annoyed with me. I told them they needed to read all the books, so I'm hoping they will.

With Dwight suspended, McQuarrie Middle School is missing its most famous attendee: origami Yoda. And no Yoda means no case file mystery to solve. But just as Tommy wonders if he'll ever find anything interesting to write about again, something BIG happens. Something BIG and HAIRY. It's a Fortune Wookiee, a paper fortune teller in the form of Chewbacca. Sara brings it to school as a gift from Dwight, and it seems to give advice that's just as good as Yoda's. Mysterious it is!
Tommy, Kellen, and Harvey are on the case. and when their classmates start having strange "Dwight Sightings" (sightings of Dwight in which he is Yoda-less and acting WAY too normal), the boys have TWO mysteries to solve. The closer they get, the more possible it show more seems that origami Yoda will be back... show less

Read in an hour and a half. About as fun as the first two, I think. I just love the Star Wars theme (and how sixth and seventh graders know incredibly obscure Star Wars trivia so very well). This book is a lot about how being "normal" is not necessarily better for someone than being "weird," and about how the definitions of those words are totally subjective anyway—a theme I quite like.

This third in the [b:The Strange Case of Origami Yoda|7150174|The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (Origami Yoda #1)|Tom Angleberger|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328813137s/7150174.jpg|7415356] series will not leave fans disappointed. Now that Dwight's transfered to Tippett Academy, Tommy and the gang at McQuarrie Middle School have resigned themselves to a colorless, Origami Yoda-less school year. But wait! Sara arrives at school one day with a fortune Wookiee that Dwight gave her to serve as their source of inspiration in Origami Yoda's absence. Chewie the fortune Wookiee is basically a cootie catcher. And of course, since Chewbaccca's speech is unintelligible to most of us, finger puppet Han Foldo is there to interpret. Once again, show more students can voice their concerns and allow the wisdom of Star Wars characters to guide them. BUT-- all is still not well. Various Dwight-sightings have Tommy and his friends concerned: Dwight seems to have ditched Origami Yoda, and he's acting way too normal. Can his friends do an intervention to bring the real Dwight back? Will Principal Rabbski get her way and ban further origami from the halls of McQuarrie Middle School? Will the newly-implemented FUNTIME! (replacement of art, music, and other electives with time devoted to bringing standardized testing scores up) suck the remaining life out of everyone? The cliffhanger ending keeps the humor and excitement going till the very last page, but sadly means that all of Tom Angleberger's fans will have to wait until the fourth installment for these answers. show less

So, thanks to work-related deadlines and I have too many books to read in a short amount of time (why does everything come out in September, why?), I broke my rule about not starting series in the middle. We’ve gotten in the other Origami Yoda books in at work, and I’ve made mental notes to check them out, but I just never gotten around to doing so before we returned them.

That said, this was a solid read, and one that I was able to plow through pretty quick. I liked the journalistic style, I thought the kids were fun and they all had their own distinct voices (as well as page font, but you could tell who was talking without noticing the change in typesetting). The plot is a little thin, but I’m chalking that more to the fact that show more I haven’t read the previous two books, and so I don’t know the full story behind Dwight and the Origami Yoda. The message is very much a diatribe against schools cutting the arts and killing kids’ creative in order to focus on testing. (Which isn’t a bad message, but it does have a very anvilicious feel to it.) The only thing I don’t really like with the book overall is that the main characters feel cheated that the person behind the Fortune Wookie was Sarah and that she was dispensing girl advice. I liked the portrayal of nerdy girls in this book, but I don’t like the idea that “Oh, well, her advice is more manipulative than the kind Dwight gives.” It doesn’t outright say it, but that’s what it felt like to me.

It’s a solid read, and while I’m not entirely with the end, I’m going to go back and read the earlier books, if only to get a better grasp on the plot. show less