Big Nate The Gerbil Ate My Homework is pitch-perfect

I should be working right now. Instead, I got sucked into the black hole that sometimes whirls around me which is Big Nate. In this case, it’s the 23^rd installment of Lincoln Peirce’s instantly funny comic strip series. Big Nate The Gerbil Ate My Homework collects strips that were originally published in newspapers from February 16, 2016, through September 6, 2016. I should be working, but like only eating one potato chip or only watching one cat video I’m failing miserably at only reading a couple of Big Nate comic strips.

Middle school is so perfectly captured in this comic strip series. It’s a time when kids are old enough to know many things, but still young enough to be goofy people whose impossible schemes still might come true.  Boys are starting to notice girls. Girls notice some boys and everybody’s hobbies are changing.

One aspect that we love about Big Nate is how it can take a joke and effectively work it in many different directions. A great example of this is a series of strips that focus on a conversation between Nate and Mrs. Czerwicki. She’s running the detention class now and is already familiar with Nate. The observations and quips between those two had me laughing out loud during my children’s tennis practice.

She doesn’t read comic strips and Nate is in a state of disbelief that anyone could not read them. “I even read the bad ones”, Nate tells her in a state of frustration. He tells her his reading routine and then she replies by stating that she reads “obituaries, Dear Abby and the Jumble”. The only exception to that is if there’s someone she knows in the first column, then she skips the Jumble.

Mr. Rosa, Nate’s favorite teacher also has some hilarious strips that both kids and adults will love. There are some strips or parts of different stories that focus on the melancholy side of middle school life. I bet that our 10-year-old still enjoys them, but the ones that he shares with me are the funny ones. More specifically, he shares the funny ones that poke fun at older people, like Nate’s teachers or his family.

If you have a middle-school student then you’ll be able to immediately laugh and relate to this collection. In ten years you’ll be able to relate to and laugh at the collection if you had a middle-school student in the past 30 years. There might be some minute differences, but for the most part, it captures adolescence in a bottle, plus or minus 30 years.

Big Nate The Gerbil Ate My Homework is by Lincoln Peirce and on McMeel Publishing.

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