Book review: Millicent Min, Girl Genius


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Author:Lisa Yee
Reading Level (Conceptual):Children 12 and up
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 8 and up
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2003

A must-read for gifted girls, especially those in middle school or grade-skipped into high school.

Eleven-year old Millicent Min will be a senior in high school in the fall, but at the beginning of the summer we read about, she is teacher's pet in a community college poetry class and students ranging in age from high school age through college take advantage of her as a tutor but don't treat her as a friend. "Sooo sad!", my 10 year old sighs, empathetically.

Lisa Yee claims to not have skipped five grades in school, but she certainly understands what many of the issues that might confront a sensitive, gifted, 11-year old high school senior might be.


The plot is NOT what makes this book so good. Even my daughter, who is usually not keen to guess plot twists, figured out early on what many would be. (And said, "foreshadowing".) No matter -- the characters are spot-on.

My daughter rated this a 4 out of 5, but that was because, "it ended".

An interesting thread of questions it raised for her started with "Is there such a thing as an average IQ?", proceeded to "And how do you know what someone's IQ is?", to "Do you know MY IQ?", to "What IS my IQ?"....
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