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Summary
Summary
"The Nate series by Tim Federle is a wonderful evocation of what it's like to be a theater kid. Highly recommended." --Lin-Manuel Miranda, star and creator of the musical, Hamilton
Third time's a charm! Nate Foster returns home to Jankburg, Pennsylvania, to face his biggest challenge yet--high school--in this final novel in the Lambda Literary Award-winning Nate trilogy, which The New York Times calls "inspired and inspiring."
When the news hits that E.T.: The Musical wasn't nominated for a single Tony Award--not one!--the show closes, leaving Nate both out of luck and out of a job. And while Nate's cast mates are eager to move on (the boy he understudies already landed a role on a TV show!), Nate knows it's back to square one, also known as Jankburg, Pennsylvania. Where horror (read: high school) awaits.
Desperate to turn his life from flop to fabulous, Nate takes on a huge freshman English project with his BFF, Libby: he's going to make a musical out of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations . (What could possibly go...right?) But when Nate's New York crush ghosts him, and his grades start to slip, he finds the only thing harder than being on Broadway is being a freshman -- especially when you've got a secret you're desperate to sing out about.
This magical conclusion to Tim Federle's beloved Nate series is a love letter to theater kids young and not-so-young--and for anyone who ever wondered if they could truly go home again. Especially when doing so means facing everything you thought you'd left behind.
Author Notes
Tim Federle is the showrunner and executive producer of High School Musical: the Musical: the Series , which he created for Disney+. His novels include the New York Times Notable Book Better Nate Than Ever and its Lambda Literature Award-winning sequel--which Lin-Manuel Miranda called "a wonderful evocation of what it's like to be a theater kid" ( New York Times ). A film adaptation of Nate , written and directed by Federle, will premiere on Disney+ in spring 2022. The film stars Aria Brooks, Joshua Bassett, Lisa Kudrow, and Rueby Wood as Nate. Tim's hit series of cocktail recipe books, including Tequila Mockingbird , have sold over half a million copies worldwide. He cowrote the Broadway musical adaptation of Tuck Everlasting and won the Humanitas Prize for cowriting the Golden Globe and Academy Award-nominated Best Animated Feature Ferdinand , starring John Cena and Kate McKinnon. A former Broadway dancer, Tim was born in San Francisco, grew up in Pittsburgh, and now divides his time between Los Angeles and the internet.
Reviews (4)
Horn Book Review
Federle wraps up Nate's story (Better Nate Than Ever; Five, Six, Seven, Nate!) by taking his title character from Broadway to a new stage: high school. There he comes out as gay to his classmates and spearheads a musical production of Great Expectations. Smart and snappy prose, lighthearted drama, and great characterizations make for an entertaining and moving trilogy finale. (c) Copyright 2019. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Attention theater nerds! Nate Foster has returned for one last encore. Sadly, Nate's return is not off to a promising start. His world is breaking apart. The not-really-a-hit E.T.: The Musical did not pick up any Tony nominations, and as Broadway babies know, this usually signals the end of most musical runs. As the show enters its final days, Nate must come to terms with returning home to Jankburg, Pennsylvania, saying goodbye to his aunt and NYC-guardian, Heidi, and leaving his crush (and make-out buddy) Jordan, the star of the show. Things may not be completely bleak, however. Once home, Nate is reunited with his best friend, Libby, and begins his new quest: high school, where his adventures include self-discovery, musical theater (duh), crushes, and coming out. Federle is in fine form here, and readers will laugh out loud at Nate's adventures (and dramatics). The storyline may have matured along with Nate, but the tone is still fresh, irreverent, and over-the-top. Some subplots may be a skosh unrealisticsuch as Nate's near-total acceptance in his new schoolbut readers will likely forgive a point or two as the teen thespians mount a musical adaptation of Great Expectations. As enjoyable as Nate may be, the standout character of the book is Libby, whose Tina Fey-like humor and Oprah-like efficiency will have readers in stitches.An exceptional swan song for a beloved character. (Fiction 10-14) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Drummed off of Broadway and forced to go crawling back to Pennsylvania, freshman Nate Foster is worried that high school won't be as fabulous as the Big Apple, that his parents won't be as supportive as his theater family, and that he'll miss kissing his boyfriend. Yet as in the first two books in this entertaining series, readers will see a determined and resilient young man, and when Nate and his best friend turn a dull English assignment into a musical version of Great Expectations, his show-biz magic brightens the existence of his fellow students. Just as one character prophetically warns, Charm can get you far in Times Square. But be careful back home, this final act set in Nate's hometown isn't quite as charming as the high bar set in the series' earlier NYC adventures, yet it's satisfying and has some great one-liners (Sometimes I feel like I'm three life choices away from having a signature wig line). If you know the difference between a cast album and a soundtrack, this is the book for you!--Andrew Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FOR PARENTS who struggle to keep their kids in books, sequels are a blessing. If kids like the first book, it's almost a guarantee they will like the next, and the next, and so on. Many an author who has delighted children once can successfully spin out characters and plots into new iterations, even if they never anticipated creating a series. Surprisingly to us jaded adults, the quality of these sequels doesn't necessarily drop off a cliff. These four new books for middlegrade readers all reprise characters and settings from previous favorites. JENNIFER L. HOLM, who traverses many genres from graphic novels to historical fiction and has been awarded three Newbery Honors, has followed up her 2014 best seller "The Fourteenth Goldfish" with the THIRD MUSHROOM (Random House, 217 pp., $16.99; ages 8 to 12). In the first book, the middle schooler Elbe Cruz is living an unexceptional life when her mom is summoned by the police and returns home with a 13-year-old boy who is actually Elbe's grandfather, Melvin Sagarsky, a retired scientist made young again through the cellular regeneration properties of a rare jellyfish. Forced to attend middle school with Elbe, Melvin enlists her and her friend Raj in a plot to patent the reverse-aging process. "The Fourteenth Goldfish" was an appealing mix of true-tolife and plain bizarre - and now, one year later, "The Third Mushroom" finds Elbe in seventh grade and needing a partner in the county science fair. Naturally, she teams up with Melvin - who may be her grandfather but is now hitting puberty, so he eats a ton, sleeps late and needs braces. The premise is barely explained in the sequel, so it helps to have read "The Fourteenth Goldfish," but Melvin's transformation is just as amusing. Elbe and Melvin's project on fruit flies goes awry when Melvin starts experimenting on himself. Their discovery winds up reversing the anti-aging process. They don't win the prize, but Elbe gets her real grandfather back. "He seems lighter," she observes. As for Melvin, he says with a shrug: "To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to having to take the SATs again." Holm's still-witty sequel adds a touching element of loss in the back story of the death of Elbe's grandmother, whom Melvin's scientific genius could not save. TIM FEDERLE, who co-wrote the musical "Ttick Everlasting" and the movie "Ferdinand," knows the territory of being a misunderstood theater kid. As a teenager, he escaped his hometown to come to New York City to pursue a Broadway career. His novel "Better Nate Than Ever" told the story of Nate Foster, an eighth grader who steals his mom's A.T.M. card and his brother's fake ID and boards a bus to try out for a Broadway musical version of "E.T." Next came "Five, Six, Seven, Nate!," in which Nate lands an ensemble role, moves to New York and prepares for opening night. Now the series comes to an end with nate EXPECTATIONS (Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $17.99; ages io to 14), which tackles what happens after your dream comes true: The show closes after bad reviews. As with his earlier books, Federle skillfully pivots between the comedic commentary and the moving introspection of a boy trying to find his place in a homophobic world. After experiencing the freedom to be himself - as web as a secret romance with a castmate - Nate Foster has to go back to Jankburg, Pa., "a town that somehow both never knew my name but also hated everything about me." To make things worse, the high school auditorium is being torn down to build a lacrosse field. Undeterred in his love of the theater, Nate sets out to stage a musical production of "Great Expectations" in the gym, and instead of getting ostracized, he gains fans among students and administrators alike. "Some days you're a freshman in high school, and though the world is a bubble of suck, inside the bubble you've made something rare and beautiful," Nate observes. Readers will feel reassured that Nate will survive high school and go on to pursue his passion with confidence. "ZORA WAS BOLD and honest like a bumblebee asking to nectar on springtime flowers, and loud and fearless like a bobcat," says 12-year-old Carrie Brown, the narrator of the beautifully written zora and me: THE CURSED GROUND (Candlewick, 250 pp., $16.99; ages 10 and up), by T. R. Simon. In this second book in a promised series that imagines the life of the young Zora Neale Hurston, Zora and her friend Carrie solve a murder in their town of Eatonville, Fla., in the early 1900s. Although Eatonville is the first black incorporated town in America, Zora and Carrie are hardly shielded from the racial violence of the post-Reconstruction era. In "Zora and Me: The Cursed Ground," the two girls learn about the enslaved history of some of their town's inhabitants and the ongoing legacy of that bloody bondage. When Zora and Carrie stumble upon an old slave plantation house in 1903, they can hardly imagine a world where people are treated like property. But then two white men ride into town claiming that the land should never have been incorporated into Eatonville. Zora's father, who is Eatonville's mayor, is forced to take a stance. "The past is coming for us, isn't it?" her mother asks. "White men with lynching ropes will hang us from trees here as easily as they did in Alabama. We were foolish to think that there could ever be a safe place, that we could ever get away." The land in question holds a dark secret, one told in flashbacks from a healer named Old Lady Bronson that slowly connect the past with the present. The flashbacks vividly depict Old Lady Bronson's life as a young girl when she was taken from Hispaniola to Florida to work on the plantation. The connection between slave times and Zora and Carrie's world unravels slowly and with well-crafted suspense and a horrifying surprise twist. "History wasn't just something you read in a book," Carrie observes. "It was everything your life stood on. We who thought we were free from the past were still living it out " MIDDLE-GRADE FICTION has seen no shortage of books in the Harry Potter/Percy Jackson mold - stories of outsiders whisked off to parallel worlds where they discover their special power, receive their education and face trials to determine if they will use their potential for good or evil. These story lines often follow Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" and provide an ample runway for a blockbuster series. Jessica Townsend's best-selling "Nevermoor" set the stage for such a breakout by introducing 12-year-old Morrigan Crow, who is hated and feared even by her own family until she is plucked for membership into the elite Wundrous Society, where those with special talents collaborate to protect the land of Nevermoor against evil elements. Townsend's sequel, wundersmith: The Calling of Morrigan Crow (Little, Brown, 337 pp., $17.99; ages 8 to 12), follows her heroine through her first year of training. It's filled with creative details of a school unlike any other (classes in speaking to dragons; half-human, half-tortoise teachers who can slow time). But unlike J. K. Rowling and Rick Riordan, Townsend has created a completely fantastical realm, so it lacks the playful tension between the real and the make-believe (such as taking the Long Island Expressway to Camp Halfblood in Riordan's books). As pure fantasy, it also requires more back story, and "Wundersmith" gets bogged down in places by recapping what happened in "Nevermoor." But Townsend's skillful, suspense-filled storytelling in "Wundersmith" will keep readers entertained, as Morrigan and her eccentric classmates face a test of loyalty and bravery in what will surely be the first of many to come. After all, Morrigan's got five more years of school ahead of her. RUTH DAVIS KÖNIGSBERG, the author of "The Truth About Grief," is working on a master's degree in library science.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Nate Expectations Not Bitter!! So . . . some breaking news. The show didn't get a single Tony Award nomination. I suppose I should get that out now, in case you think the rest of this is gonna be the enlightened thoughts of a famous person. Just don't want to disappoint you. E.T.: The Musical did get an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination. For costumes. (Yay.) But, look, if you saw the way the rubber E.T. suit glistens in the spotlight, and how the audience oohs and aahs over the whole cast in alien garb for the curtain call (we tap dance!), you'd nominate us for costumes, too. Correction. Unless you're a Tony Awards nominator. In which case, you'd think we'd opened several seasons ago. Or never opened at all! Not bitter. "Well, this is awkward," one of my dressing roommates says. We're five floors up, backstage at the Shubert Theater, and nobody's making eye contact. The nominations came out this morning. (Well, other shows' nominations did. Not us!) "Agreed," I manage to kind of say. I'm actually surprised how emotionally it comes out--I thought I'd gotten all my tears out back at Aunt Heidi's place, in Queens. She handed me a square of toilet paper (she says Kleenex is a waste) and murmured something about how "crying in Queens is redundant." Adults like to talk in poetry, did you know that? Knock-knock. The "nice" stage manager (Lori, not Ashlee, who hates kids) is at our dressing-room door. Stage managers are like teachers who wear all black, as if they're at a funeral where you're expected to carry a clipboard and hound people about not eating chocolate while in costume. "Hey guys," Lori says, "just . . . checkin' in." Hoo, boy. This particular stage manager never "just checks in," unless something bad is in the air. (Sometimes literally--recently one of my dressing roommates heated up broccoli in the company microwave and didn't put a lid on the Tupperware.) "Are we in trouble?" I ask, and Lori makes one of those faces you make when you're watching a YouTube of a very old dog trying to hop up on a sofa. "Of course not," she says. Oh, boy. It really is bad. Any time an adult is checking in but doesn't have punishment up their sleeve, you know something big is going down. "I just figured you guys might be a little bummed out," Lori says. "You know, because of the news." "We know," we all say at once. Really, though, it's a lack of news. Is it news if you aren't even noticed? I mean, I'm not trying to be self-pitying here--I'm still just a kid from the Midwest who managed to break his way into a Broadway show--but, c'mon. Did we really deserve this? The New York Times called us "surprising!" and the New York Post said: "See this show, if you dare, while it's still running." In some circles, those are raves! We dressing-room boys have been on a group-text chain all day. It started with us sending a bunch of GIFs of former Tony Award-winning actresses tripping while they were walking up to the podium. Classic, harmless boy stuff. By the third nomination category, though--which we were all live-streaming from the comfort of our own studio apartments--when Elliott's Mom didn't get a Supporting Actress nomination (she literally sings better than anyone on the internet), our group text went quiet. And then it started filling up with all kinds of all-cap SWEAR WORDS that I will leave out here. But you can imagine. "Okay, well," Lori the stage manager says, trailing off before taking off. "Just doin' my rounds . . ." There are just certain things you can't wrap up with a cheery fortune-cookie response. Not that she doesn't try: "Go out there and tell the story tonight," she says, a moment after leaving us, popping back in and looking unconvinced by her own advice. "Oh, and by the way--this is your half-hour call." The room is quiet. We'll have an audience in those seats in a half hour. No matter how we feel--and we all have a lot of feelings--we'll have to plaster on some smiles and go put on a show. I don't think people realize how weird and hard it is to perform on Broadway. It's eight shows a week, two of them matinees, and no matter what's going on in your personal life--like, if you happen to regularly kiss the boy who's playing the lead, and thus all you want to do is stare at him when you're onstage together in the Act One classroom scene--you have to just "tell the story." That was our assistant director's signature phrase, when he'd come back to check in on the show in the weeks leading up to the Tony nominations. Correction: to our lack of Tony nominations. "Just go out there," the assistant director said to us guys, "and get in the mindset of your character. What does your character want? That's your only responsibility. To show the audience what your characters want, and to bring your full, professional conviction to it." "My character wants to be a vital part of a Tony-nominated hit," I wanted to say. But I've been trained to just nod and write down what adults say. This is a good overall life technique, I've come to learn: Just nod at adults, whether you agree or not. Apparently--this is a shock, but my Aunt Heidi told me--adults "just want to be heard." Try being fourteen! Oh, the Tonys! The Tonys, for those who don't know--and if you don't, buckle up, because it's gonna be a lot of this--are like the Oscars of theater. Or as I like to say: The Oscars are the Tonys of film. "At this evening's performance"--the stage manager announcements are now droning on from our overhead speakers, and they're typically pretty epic--"the role of Elliott's Mom will be played by Marci Carroll." All us boys sit up straight, shook by this news. Marci has only been on once, and only for half an act. It was a few months ago, when our regular Elliott's Mom came down with something mysterious after eating a street hot dog on a "disastrous" (her word) first Tinder date with a handsome banker type who, in her retelling, kept calling E.T. a "play" instead of a musical. Which made me feel like I'd eaten a bad hot dog. Who are these people? Plays instead of musicals? What's next: calling cast albums "soundtracks"? I shudder at the memory and put gel in my hair. Anyway, Marci's on for Elliott's Mom tonight. "And now people start dropping like flies," says Roberto, my dressing roommate who applies too much eyeliner to be playing a seventh-grade boy in mid-eighties California. "Down, down, down we go." This kid's been in three other Broadway shows. Three! I heard a rumor his real name is Robert and his agent made him add the o to "stand out." Who knows. "Wait, why?" I see my lips saying in the dressing-room mirror. "Why are people gonna start dropping like flies?" "Because," Roberto-but-really-Robert says at me, like I'm eight, "our show didn't get any nominations. So now everyone's over it, and gonna find new jobs." I'm not over it. Roberto puts down his eyeliner pencil and clucks his lips at me as if I'm seven, like I'm aging in reverse. I'm not over any of it. My dressing room mirror is covered in opening-night cards that I wedged into its metal frame. There's stuff up there from my parents, but not my older brother, Anthony--who doesn't even call musicals "plays" because he doesn't even acknowledge their existence as a concept. Anyway, I'm seeing the greetings like it's opening night all over again: a card with a kitty who's wearing, like, a Shakespeare hat, from Aunt Heidi. A note from Libby, my best friend from Jankburg, PA, who hand-decorated a Halloween card and drew a red arrow pointing at a skeleton, and signed it: "This is me when you're away." (Dead.) And also my favorite opening night card of all, from Jordan, the boy I've had this . . . secret thing with, for the last couple months. I guess other boys play video games. Jordan just plays with my feelings. He's got the all-time high score. "Fifteen minutes," comes the overhead announcement. Jordan didn't sign the card, by the way. He just wrote: "From, you know who!" Because I did, and I do. Or at least I thought I did. His dressing room is two floors away. Can you ever really get to know a guy if his dressing room is two floors away? I pull open my drawer and fish around, pushing past the lipstick and homework I ignore equally. "Nate, let's roll," says one of the child guardians, standing in the doorway. If stage managers are teachers at a funeral, child guardians are babysitters on turbo blast. "Gotta get you to wigs." I wear a wig in the first scene, but it isn't as fun as it sounds. They are hot, and they are expensive, and every adult in the building will remind you of this twenty-four-six. (We get one day off per week.) Damaging a wig is less forgivable than, like, accidentally breaking the arm of a fellow cast member. Cast members are replaceable. Wigs, no. "Naaate. Seriously. Move it." I give the international "just one second" sign to the guardian, because I want to find my green rabbit foot. Jordan gave it to me on opening night, to replace the famous green rabbit foot that I carried with me on my E.T. audition, and then lost on my bus ride home. "We gotta roll now, my dude," says the guardian, who never calls me his dude. I give up on finding the rabbit foot. I was gonna make a wish on it, an earnest wish. Something about our show, about me and Jordan, about hoping a lack of Tony nominations doesn't signal a lack of a meaningful future. My dad, a maintenance engineer (janitor), once said the most important thing a man can do is start off on the right foot. Is this the right foot? Moving to New York, and New York telling you, "You know what, we don't want you here either, actually." "My dude," the guardian says, "you're standing on my foot." He's right. I am. I guess I stood up to go downstairs to wigs, and checked my phone to see what people online were saying about our zero (that's 0) Tony nominations, and apparently I stepped on the guardian. My body's kind of doing its own thing these days. Sue it! I hope none of this sounds like I'm complaining, by the way. Not bitter!! It's just . . . the tricky part about having your dream come true is that then you want to hold on to it. Make a wish on it. Put it on a keychain and check on it, thirty times a day, every time you can't remember if your life is real and if the wish stays yours, or stays true, once it becomes real. Anyway, if you see my green rabbit foot around, tell it I say hi. I've got a ton of wishes I'm trying to narrow down, and I could use a prop. I like to think of wishes as dreams that just majored in musical theater--but I'm weird. As I'm guessing you've already figured out. Excerpted from Nate Expectations by Tim Federle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.