Rating: 
Summary: Konigsburg's best
Review: When Mrs. Olinsky was asked how she selected her team for the Academic Bowl, she always gave different answers. She once said she chose a red-head, a blond, a brunette and a student with hair as black as newsprint...another time she said the team became a team when they called themselves The Souls.The truth is that Mrs. Olinsky didn't know how she chose her team of sixth graders. It hardly matters, The Souls had beaten the 7th and 8th graders and were headed to Albany to win the state trophy. Just what makes this team called The Souls so special? This is a great book, just dying to be read aloud...please read this book, you'll love every second!
Rating:
Summary: The best fiction book for gifted students I have read!
Review: I am a fifth grade teacher and I teach a cluster group of aboutfive gifted students in my classroom each year. I read A View FromSaturday at home this year and fell in love. The Mixed Up Files is one of our fifth grade novels, so I was interested in this new book. It is marvelous! The characters are so realistic. I can see my gifted students identifying with the kids in this book. If you are a student in a gifted education program, or a parent of a gifted student, read this book! At the end of the year I went out and bought a copy of it for each of my five students. Inside I wrote what I believe is the moral of the story, "People will not recognize or remember you for your intelligence. They will remember you for your kindness and the impressions you make on them personally." Enjoy. The author did a wonderful thing in writing this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great Read!
Review: Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful book! This is a great example of using more than one view in a plot. The characters in this book are very knowable and sympathetic. By combining so many different personalities in these characters, Konigsburg has created a story that will become as much as a classic as "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler". By using a teacher to place four kids in a competitive situation, the reader gets a chance to understand how these kids think and feel. The reader also gets to see how their feelings changes towards each other and towards others. Very much a coming of age type book. An excellent read!
Rating:
Summary: E.L. Writes A Good Book
Review: I had to do a project on this at grad school. At first I thought this was a horrible book because I had to read it in 1 1/2 days. I loved it! It's a little confusing but great!
Rating:
Summary: The proof of the pudding is in the eating...again and again
Review: The View from Saturday is like an onion that gets larger as you peel it. Each time you read it you find more and more in it. It is full of subtlety and wonderful messages. The most wonderful is that the fact that people who are seeming misfits can find a place to fit. They may not all succeed as the "Souls" did but the most wonderful thing the Souls had was their acceptance and friendship for each other and for Mrs. Olinski. By accepting each other they allowed each other to bloom. I am a teacher and I often find that blossoming is often not so much a matter of ability or "IQ" but of desire and interest, lighting the fire so to speak. The story is captivating to me, because the characters are interested, passionate and mostly, nice in the truest sense of the word.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: When I first read this book, it was the year it won the Newberry Medal. I thought it was wonderful then and have now read it numerous times. This is one of the best books I have ever read. I love E.L. Konigsburg's style. This book has many lessons of friendship for readers of all ages.
Rating: 
Summary: disturbingly sweet
Review: A lot of books in the Newberry canon run the risk of being so "nice" in their outlook that they are cruel to actual young readers who may view reality differently--or who may be forced to live a reality a lot grittier than that of the books. Konisburg's book is an especially egregious example of this. It's so sugar-coated it's poisonous. The book's major premise is that kindness determines intellectual merit, and that only "good" people can be truly smart. The teacher protagonist chooses her academic bowl team based on a very subjective idea of virtue, and the book authorizes her choice by making her team victorious. This team is called The Souls, and the book strongly implies that the four team members have souls in a way that most "ordinary" sixth graders do not. In some ways this is a great book. It has a lot of smart things to say about growing up, accepting loss, learning to be part of a community, and learning to be tolerant. But in other ways it is a profoundly narrow-minded book that emphasizes the idea of the special few, the "souls" who rise above the common herd. Furthermore, it implies that being a "soul" is synomymous with being intellectually competent. This is a familiar fantasy, known to all teachers (I'm one myself), about those "special" kids who really make a difference in your life. But any teacher who takes it seriously is taking a deeply unethical view of education, and any young person who takes it seriously is being taught a deeply naive view of what it means to be an adult.
Rating:
Summary: My All-time FAVORITE book!
Review: When I first read this book about a year and a half ago, I was amazed by E. L. Koningsburg's incredible story. It is a little strange in its content part, but it's an incredibly good story that I think anyone would enjoy. I would personally reccommend it to kids between the ages of 10 and 18, but I think all adults would enjoy this book too, The moral of this book has stuck in my head for the year and a half since I read it, and I'm sure everyone would enjoy this book too.
Rating:
Summary: A quick and terrific read!
Review: I really enjoyed reading The View from Saturday. E.L. Konigsburg does an outstanding job of connecting the chapters through sample questions asked at the Academic Bowl competition. This leads to more detail about each of the characters. The reader is able to understand how each member of the academic team contributed personal experience and talent. The only problem with this book is that it was hard to put down!
Rating:
Summary: A View Worth While
Review: This book is totally neat. E.L. Konigburg really shows somecool new things in it. Especially since my daughter enjoyed the bookfor a book report. You got to go read it.It's truly awesome!
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