Standing Up to Mr. O book review

Book cover

Author: Claudia Mills

Realistic Fiction

Claudia Mills was born in New York City in 19654. She has several degrees including a Ph. D. in philosophy from Princeton University. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has written several children’s novels. Author’s Website: http://claudiamillsauthor.com/

If you read this book you will be sucked into a junior high girl’s desperate attempt to truly change the world. She’s even willing to make her favorite teacher, Mr. O., mad at her.  I would recommend this book to the following content areas:

Science-especially biology: dissections

English: imagery, inferences, writing, predictions, visualization

Summary of Standing Up to Mr. O

Maggie McIntosh is crazy about her biology teacher and loves to impress him with her academic excellence. But when the dreaded day of the first dissection arrives, Maggie has to disappoint Mr. O. There's no way she can cut up a worm.

Maggie's best friend, Alycia, understands. Alycia is squeamish, too, and shares Maggie's moral outrage. However, she's willing to keep quiet and let her lab partner do the dirty work. Maggie's own lab partner, Matt, completely disagrees. Then, after Maggie walks out on the dissection, he seems to respect her. And classmate Jake, who follows Maggie out the door, appears positively smitten.

As she struggles to clarify her position about dissections, Maggie discovers that people and relationships are not always what they seem, and just as there are no perfect fathers (hers left years before), there are no perfect father figures - or even friends

After not completing the first two dissections and receiving two F’s, Maggie still is not budging on her stance that killing animals for science is wrong. The next dissection will be of a frog, but first Mr. O. is going to pith a frog for the class. (This is done by cutting the head off of a live frog and finding nerves in the spinal column to see how nerves cause muscle movement.) Maggie wants to save the frog and with the help of her rebel “boyfriend” they have a scheme to save the frog.

Does Maggie decide to do the final dissection?
Or will Mr. O. finally see Maggie’s point of view?
To find out you’ll have to read Standing up to Mr. O. by Claudia Mills.


This is a must read for a life science student from 7-10th grade.  It really would probably be better for a seventh or eighth grader or a lower level ninth or tenth grader.  However, it was a page turner for me!