Gary D. SchmidtThe Absolute Value of Mike is a comedy about deadly serious things. It is also decidedly more comic than either of Kathryn Erskine's two earlier books, mostly because of its quirky cast and authentic 14-year-old voice…
—The New York Times
Publishers WeeklyFollowing her National Book Award win for Mockingbird, Erskine tries her hand at comedy with this story of an undervalued boy learning his considerable worth. Mike's father, a math professor, must teach in Romania for six weeks, so he ships his motherless 14-year-old to live with distant relatives and work on an engineering project to improve Mike's chances of getting into a math magnet school. Mike's dyscalculia, a math disability, telegraphs immediately that this plan won't succeed, but things go wrong in surprising ways.
