PositiveThe Washington Post... thoroughly researched, unsparing and intimately detailed ... As kids head back to school in this third year of the pandemic, Kamenetz has given us an essential read for anyone who wants to understand how American schools and schoolchildren fared in the early days. The book also investigates the historical factors, blatant inattention, and racist and sexist world that had shaped America’s public school and child-care systems into what they were by the time the virus began closing schools across the country in March 2020 ... She also offers thought-provoking, clear-eyed insights into the way systems and people functioned, and did not function, during the pandemic ... To her credit, Kamenetz has no desire to play the blame game. Rather than deploy a favorite argument of the right — that left-leaning parents, school officials and teachers’ unions were responsible for school closures — or entertain progressives’ assertions that virus-denying, Trump-supporting proponents of school reopening did not care much whether teachers lived or died, Kamenetz takes a more balanced view ... Still, the book is at times confusing, leaping backward and forward in time despite its ostensible division into sections labeled “Spring 2020,” “Summer 2020” and so on. The plethora of expert, parent and student voices from across the country can be overwhelming — and sometimes I wished for more direct quotes and thoughts from the children she interviewed, rather than summaries of their parents’ perspectives ... The book is at its best when Kamenetz’s human reporting is allowed to dominate the page.
