Willie, Max, Destiny, and Giovanni, the four narrators, are all students at a poorly funded multicultural public school in Queens, New York, where a new classroom is opened up to deal with overcrowding and provide several fifth-grade homerooms with a chance to get rid of their least favorite students. The new teacher relies heavily on creative writing, and the narrators and their classmates learn more about their abilities and how to express and resolve some of the many problems they and their families face.
Tropes in the book:
- Asian and Nerdy: The Chinese Ah Kum is a Shrinking Violet who gets perfect grades on most assignments and paints, writes, and knits. However, she is also a Deconstructed Character Archetype of this, as she enjoys hanging out with Lovable Alpha Bitch Destiny, secretly wants to dye her hair and only cares about her grades because her terrifying father wants her to be a pharmacist when she grows up due to their status as poor immigrants and will make her life Hell over The B Grade, let alone anything less than that. Destiny makes a mental "Not So Different" Remark about Ah Kum and Max after seeing the look on Ah Kum's face as Max yells about his abusive father during an argument.
- Character Catchphrase:
- Easily flustered Italian immigrant Giovanni often begins a sentence by saying "Scuzi".
- Willie repeatedly says, "Everything's cook and curry" (an expression he learned from his Jamaican grandmother) when in a positive mood. This is one of the first things that attracts Destiny to him.
- Commonality Connection: The popular, outgoing Willie muses that one of the reasons he and angry loner Max get along so well is that they both have absent fathers who they have mixed feelings about and have traveled around through lots of neighborhoods and attended lots of schools while their families struggle to find a permanent home.
- Dude Magnet: Ashley is a pleasant and unassuming girl whom Giovanni can spend uninterrupted periods of several minutes dreamily staring at. When Ashley is transferred to 5E, the sounds of dismay from many other boys in her old homeroom make it clear that Giovanni is far from the only one drawn to her that way.
- Foreshadowing: The Reveal that Ms. Hill's boyfriend is local boxing legend Vinny the Hammer is subtly foreshadowed by how she mentions they visit his grandmother at the nursing home where Max's mom works, where it's mentioned Vinny's grandmother lives, and she gives her students boxing tickets as class prizes.
- Girl Posse: Destiny, Ah Kum, Ashley (who some students compare to a Disney Princess), Amber, Chelsea, and later Natalia, Carmen, Dalma, and Tiffany are a close-knit group of popular girls who spend a lot of time gossiping about stuff like crushes and fashion, passing notes, and (before coming to 5E and find a teacher and subject matter they can respect) cutting class, although they are a multicultural group who enjoy art and writing and never bully anyone, even if some of their classmates initially find them annoying.
- Hero of Another Story:
- Most of the kids in the class besides the narrators clearly have a lot going on with their personal lives and backgrounds (such as adoptee Natalia, who is learning more about her biological mother and possible war refugee Asmir), their investment in the writing class (it is mentioned Ashley takes her notebook to bed with her every night), or both (such as the artistic Ah Kum having an abusive father and fond memories of China and Lin gradually becoming an invested student even though he has just moved from China and speaks no English at the start of the year).
- Giovanni's Cool Big Sis Anna Marie is learning about fashion and garment-making and spends a lot of her free time gathering discarded materials and making perfect copies of unaffordable dresses that she sees in the stores.
- Vinny the Hammer is a local boxing legend who some of the kids find contemplatively browsing through the poetry section of the library one day, emphasizing how there are lots of people experiencing the same feelings that they have about reading and writing.
- Lovable Alpha Bitch: Destiny is the gossipy leader of a group of popular female girls and can get caught up in getting what she wants. She is also sensitive to other people's feelings most of the time, reaches out to help several of her classmates during difficult times, understands that some secrets are off-limits for gossip, and works hard to be a good student.
- Parent with New Paramour: Max's divorced mother starts dating one of her coworkers, and it takes a while before Max stops stressing out about how she is paying less attention to him and could end up with another abuser like Max's father (she doesn't).
- Recurring Extra: Many students, like Ramneet, Mohammed, Tyrone, Lin, Petros, and Carmen, are mentioned multiple times throughout the story without getting much prominence or characterization.
- Satellite Love Interest: While Giovanni and Ashley's mutual crush grows throughout the book, Ashley gets more prominence as fellow narrator Destiny's friend than as Giovanni's girlfriend. They rarely, if ever, talk to each other until the last fifth of the book, and most of their interactions involve Giovanni admiring the light shining off her hair from a distance.
- Switching P.O.V.: Destiny, Max, Giovanni, and Willie take turns narrating several pages of each chapter.
- Teen Pregnancy: Natalia is the daughter of a high-school student who gave her up for adoption.
- Trophy Child: Tiffany, a New Transfer Student and one of the few upper-class students, has divorced parents who fought hard over custody of her. Her father won (implicitly because her mother has substance addiction issues), and, having gotten that victory, has proceeded to ignore her livelihood, both emotionally (he doesn't visit on Career Day) and physically (he's such a bad cook her classmates think she's bulimic due to her thinness) ever since.
