
The Misfits
by James Howe
Four misfits run for student government. Their platform: stop the names.
For you if
you have been called a name that stuck and want a book that takes that seriously as a political problem not just a personal one
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$9 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
Four seventh-grade friends — the fat kid, the gay kid, the tall girl, the angry kid — decide to run for student government on a No-Name-Calling platform. They don't win. That's not the point. Howe wrote this in 2001, before most schools had anti-bullying policies, as a direct argument that name-calling is a form of violence and that the kids most targeted by it deserve a political response, not just a therapeutic one. The book that launched No Name-Calling Week in schools across America. The most explicitly political middle grade novel on this shelf and the one that most directly tells kids that the personal is political.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Voice
- Written by a North America author
- Themes
- bullyingcoming of age
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe(2023)
dir. Aitch Alberto
One summer, secrets neither boy knew he had.
In 1987 El Paso, two Mexican-American teenage loners strike up a friendship that cracks open everything one of them has spent years keeping carefully closed off — including who he is. Adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in its tenderness rather than its edge — a bilingual, bicultural, queer coming-of-age story that doesn't need trauma to justify its own gentleness. Pedagogical in showing how friendship can crack open a kid who's spent years protecting himself by staying closed.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress(2002)
dir. Dai Sijie
Banned books, secret readings, and one crush.
Two city students sent to a remote mountain village for Maoist "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution discover a hidden suitcase of banned Western novels — and use them to woo the local tailor's granddaughter. Adapted from Dai Sijie's own novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in treating banned Western novels as genuinely dangerous contraband — literature here isn't decoration, it's the thing state re-education is specifically designed to purge. Pedagogical in showing how forbidden art still gets in, and still changes people, even under total surveillance.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie

A reservation kid goes to the white school. Everyone loses.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Darius the Great Is Not Okay
Adib Khorram

Half-Iranian, depressed, going to Iran. He finds himself there.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
It Ain't So Awful, Falafel
Firoozeh Dumas

Iranian American in 1979. Her country is on the news. Not in a good way.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Before the Ever After
Jacqueline Woodson

His dad was a football star. Something is changing. He watches.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the grown-up bookshelf
Same idea, written for a grown-up. Good for the adult in the room, too.
All Boys Aren't Blue
George M. Johnson

A Black queer memoir they tried to erase from schools
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Blankets
Craig Thompson

The memoir that proved comics could break your heart.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Different Seasons
Stephen King

How fascism finds the boy next door.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Forever...
Judy Blume

The teen novel they banned for telling the truth.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
