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Next Great Paulie Fink

Next Great Paulie Fink

Contemporary LiteratureChildren's Books
Pages
368
Published
2019
Language
English

Synopsis

The Next Great Paulie Fink centers on Caitlyn Breen, the new girl at a small rural school, who arrives to find her seventh-grade class still reeling from the sudden, unexplained disappearance of Paulie Fink — a chaotic, unforgettable troublemaker whose antics defined the group.

Unable to accept that no one can replace him, the class decides to hold an elaborate, game-show-style competition to find "the next great Paulie Fink," with Caitlyn cast as head judge. As she interviews classmates and pieces together conflicting memories of who Paulie really was, Caitlyn realizes that everyone's story is different — and that trying to define one person, or fit in with a new group, is messier than any contest can capture.

Ali Benjamin's novel is a warm, funny meditation on identity, storytelling, and what it means to belong.

Prose complexity
1/10

Vibe

FunnyHeartwarmingLighthearted
Coming of Age

Genres

Contemporary Literature Children's Books Humor

About the author

A
Ali Benjamin

Ali Benjamin is an American author of fiction for young readers and adults, based in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Her first novel, The Thing About Jellyfish (2015), in which a girl convinces herself that a jellyfish sting explains her former friend's drowning, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and a New York Times bestseller. She followed it with The Next Great Paulie Fink (2019) and The Smash-Up (2021), a novel for adults that reworks Edith Wharton's Ethan...

Characters

Caitlyn BreenProtagonist

A new student who ends up judging her class's contest to replace a vanished classmate.

Paulie FinkSupporting

The chaotic, larger-than-life classmate whose disappearance sets the plot in motion.

All characters in Next Great Paulie Fink