Save Me a Seat

Save Me a Seat (2016) is a young adult fiction novel written by Gita Varadarajan and children’s author Sarah Weeks (who is also the author of Pie and So B. It). The novel centers around two main characters, Joe and Ravi, who have both started their first week in the fifth grade at Albert Einstein Elementary School. Ravi and his family have just moved to Hamilton, New Jersey from Bangalore, India, but he believes that school will not be a problem because he was the top student in his old school in India. Ravi was also fairly popular at his old school and excelled at sports. Ravi looks forward to impressing his teachers and new friends with his abilities.

Joe has lived in Hamilton his whole life and has grown up with the students with whom he goes to school. Unlike Ravi, Joe dreads most of school as he is constantly picked on by the popular bully, Dillon Samreen. Joe’s quiet demeanor and lack of participation is often mistaken, by students and teachers alike, as a lack of intelligence but in reality, he has a condition called APD, which makes it difficult for him to sort out extraneous noises. The only part of school that Joe looks forward to is lunch, as Joe is constantly hungry. The title references both boys’ concerns over who they will sit with during lunch for the coming year.

The book’s chapters alternate between Ravi and Joe’s first-person points of view, although both the first and last chapters are told from Ravi’s perspective. The sections are divided into the five days of the school week, which are also associated with the food that is served at lunch that day. The entire novel takes place during Ravi and Joe’s first week of fifth grade.

In the first section, “Monday,” the authors introduce the protagonists and identify some of the conflicts that will arise later on in the book, namely that Ravi does not understand what a bully Dillon is and mistakenly thinks that Dillon wants to be Ravi’s friend. The first section also shows how Ravi’s expectations are not fulfilled as he is assumed to have problems speaking English, even though it is his first language. Joe begins the school year at a disadvantage, as his mother has become a lunch monitor and Joe fears that she will embarrass him. Joe also worries about a new teacher dealing with his APD and Dillon bullying him.

The second section, “Tuesday,” demonstrates Ravi’s continued attempts to impress his fellow students and his teacher, but to no avail. Joe repeatedly tries to do nice things for Ravi, but Ravi misinterprets them and still fails to understand that Dillon is a bully and not his friend. By the third section, “Wednesday,” however, Ravi finally understands that Dillon is a bully after Dillon hits Ravi with a baseball and then ridicules him in front of their classmates, shocking Ravi. Joe, on the other hand, finally stands up to Dillon, even though this success is cut short by Joe’s mom embarrassing him.

During “Thursday,” the fourth section, both Joe and Ravi stay home as their parents try to understand what is going on with each of the boys at school. The boys finally break their silences to their parents: Joe by admitting that Dillon bullies him and Ravi by admitting he feels like a failure at his new school. In the final section, “Friday,” Joe comes up with a way to give Dillon a taste of his own medicine, and he and Ravi become friends.

Many themes arise within the book, especially concerning the idea that assumptions are often wrong. Ravi repeatedly assumes things—about himself, about other people—that often turn out to be incorrect. Similarly, both Joe and Ravi fight against assumptions that are made about their intellects and overall abilities, both by teachers and by other students. Friendship plays a major role in the narrative arc, as both boys are concerned with the physical representation of friendship indicated by the title of the work. Although the novel takes place mostly at school, the conflicts primarily revolve around school’s social, not academic, atmosphere, as both boys are concerned who each will sit with at lunch. Names also play a fairly large role in determining the similarities between Joe and Ravi, as both boys believe names to be important yet are often not called by their real names, for varying reasons.

Much of the tension that the authors create within the novel relies on dramatic irony. As a result of the bifurcated point of view illustrated in the narrative, the audience often knows much more than any of the characters. The audience is placed in a more or less omniscient role within the narrative, although this omniscience is limited to the two boys’ points of view. There are very few major female characters within the book, with the exception of the teachers and both boys’ mothers, with whom they are very close. The boys must undergo conflict both at home and at school, using the support of their families in order to combat the bullying and other issues they confront at school.