I really liked that Hatke introduced a sister with autism. But Jack’s family is struggling financially, and I think many readers will relate to Jack’s situation of a parent working long hours to support the family.

In Mighty Jack, what starts as a normal little garden out back behind the house quickly grows up into a wild, magical jungle with tiny onion babies running amok, huge, pink pumpkins that bite, and, on one moonlit night that changes everything…a dragon.īased on the summary above, you see that Jack trades the car for the beans instead of trading a cow as he does in the original story. It’s the best mistake Jack has ever made. But then, one day at the flea market, Maddy does talk―to tell Jack to trade their mom’s car for a box of mysterious seeds. It’s a lot of responsibility, and it’s boring, too, because Maddy doesn’t talk. But he’s got a good reason: summer is when his single mom takes a second job and leaves him at home to watch his autistic kid sister, Maddy. Jack might be the only kid in the world who’s dreading summer. But it doesn’t follow the typical story line so you can’t easily predict what will happen next.įirst, let’s check in with the publisher’s summary:

Mighty Jack is a loose retelling of the Jack in the Beanstock story, and it’s a great retelling. I decided that Mighty Jack would be the first graphic novel I would read. I had amazing conversations about graphic novels and asked professors who were leading the sessions to suggest some graphic novels for me to read. They told I should check out First Second, and I am glad that I did. I’ll admit it: I had never read a graphic novel at this point. I decided to seek out and learn more about implementing graphic novels in my classroom while at the conference. I recently attended the 2016 Literacy Research Association conference that was held in Nashville, TN.

Ben hatke books