24. Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute

Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute
By Jarrett J. Krosoczka
Random House Children's Books, 2009

Genre
Adventure, Graphic Novel, Humor

Awards

• Kid's Indie Next List "Inspired Recommendations for Kids from Indie Booksellers" Winner (2009)
• IRA Children's Choices: Young Readers (2010)
• Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices Winner (2010)
• New York Stated Charlotte Award Nominee (2012)

Review
A group of three students, The Breakfast Bunch, discuss with each other what their lunch lady does outside of work.  Mostly they speculate that she has a lot of cats, but one of them jokingly suggests she's a secret agent! If only he knew how close the truth he was.  The lunch lady has a secret lair in the "boiler room", concealed by a large sliding fridge in the school kitchen.  Here she tests out new gadgets made by her assistant lunch lady, like the Spatu-copter (a helicopter spatula), Chicken Nugget Bombs, and Fish Stick Nunchucks, and monitors classrooms on her her huge monitor with secret cameras (Milk-cams).  In this first installment in the Lunch Lady series, she battles evil robots lead by a cyborg substitute teacher.  All these mechanical villains were created by a disliked science teacher to send away the most liked teachers in the school and replace them with cyborg substitutes that made the students do so much extra work, they would all end up liking the science teacher the best, and vote to give him the Best Teacher of the Year award.  When the Lunch Lady learns that there is something fishy going on with the new sub, she follows him after school (with the Breakfast Bunch following her to see what she really did after school was over).  Here the Lunch Lady and the children are surrounded by the robot army, but are saved by the Lunch Lady's food-weapons and one of the children's science projects.  The book ends with a cliff hanger, promising more food fights in the future.

Opinion
This is a funny little story that may have students thinking about what their teachers, school janitors, or bus drivers do after work! The story incorporates a school figure that students probably don't think about too often.  The author had very creative ways to incorporate school lunch food into funny weapons and used Batman's Batcave from the cartoons as a heavy influence on the Lunch Lady's lair, making it easily recognizable to comic book and cartoon fans.

Ideas
Having readers write a short story or draw out their own short comic strip may be a fun project.  There is also a secondary story involving a boy in the Breakfast Bunch being bullied, but learning to stand up for himself.  Despite it being a secondary element, it could still have an impact on students concerned with bullying.