What do you think?
Rate this book
Caroline Tate #3
Your Move, J.P.!
Lowry's third novel about J.P. and his sister has J.P. in love and doing all sorts of weird things, such as wearing deodorant and even telling a lie to impress Angela.
122 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
5 people are currently reading
132 people want to read
About the author
Lois Lowry
144 books22.9k followersTaken from Lowry's website:
"I’ve always felt that I was fortunate to have been born the middle child of three. My older sister, Helen, was very much like our mother: gentle, family-oriented, eager to please. Little brother Jon was the only boy and had interests that he shared with Dad; together they were always working on electric trains and erector sets; and later, when Jon was older, they always seemed to have their heads under the raised hood of a car. That left me in-between, and exactly where I wanted most to be: on my own. I was a solitary child who lived in the world of books and my own vivid imagination.
Because my father was a career military officer - an Army dentist - I lived all over the world. I was born in Hawaii, moved from there to New York, spent the years of World War II in my mother’s hometown: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and from there went to Tokyo when I was eleven. High school was back in New York City, but by the time I went to college (Brown University in Rhode Island), my family was living in Washington, D.C.
I married young. I had just turned nineteen - just finished my sophomore year in college - when I married a Naval officer and continued the odyssey that military life requires. California. Connecticut (a daughter born there). Florida (a son). South Carolina. Finally Cambridge, Massachusetts, when my husband left the service and entered Harvard Law School (another daughter; another son) and then to Maine - by now with four children under the age of five in tow. My children grew up in Maine. So did I. I returned to college at the University of Southern Maine, got my degree, went to graduate school, and finally began to write professionally, the thing I had dreamed of doing since those childhood years when I had endlessly scribbled stories and poems in notebooks.
After my marriage ended in 1977, when I was forty, I settled into the life I have lived ever since. Today I am back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, living and writing in a house dominated by a very shaggy Tibetan Terrier named Bandit. For a change of scenery Martin and I spend time in Maine, where we have an old (it was built in 1768!) farmhouse on top of a hill. In Maine I garden, feed birds, entertain friends, and read...
My books have varied in content and style. Yet it seems that all of them deal, essentially, with the same general theme: the importance of human connections. A Summer to Die, my first book, was a highly fictionalized retelling of the early death of my sister, and of the effect of such a loss on a family. Number the Stars, set in a different culture and era, tells the same story: that of the role that we humans play in the lives of our fellow beings.
The Giver - and Gathering Blue, and the newest in the trilogy: Messenger - take place against the background of very different cultures and times. Though all three are broader in scope than my earlier books, they nonetheless speak to the same concern: the vital need of people to be aware of their interdependence, not only with each other, but with the world and its environment.
My older son was a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force. His death in the cockpit of a warplane tore away a piece of my world. But it left me, too, with a wish to honor him by joining the many others trying to find a way to end conflict on this very fragile earth.
I am a grandmother now. For my own grandchildren - and for all those of their generation - I try, through writing, to convey my passionate awareness that we live intertwined on this planet and that our future depends upon our caring more, and doing more, for one another."
"I’ve always felt that I was fortunate to have been born the middle child of three. My older sister, Helen, was very much like our mother: gentle, family-oriented, eager to please. Little brother Jon was the only boy and had interests that he shared with Dad; together they were always working on electric trains and erector sets; and later, when Jon was older, they always seemed to have their heads under the raised hood of a car. That left me in-between, and exactly where I wanted most to be: on my own. I was a solitary child who lived in the world of books and my own vivid imagination.
Because my father was a career military officer - an Army dentist - I lived all over the world. I was born in Hawaii, moved from there to New York, spent the years of World War II in my mother’s hometown: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and from there went to Tokyo when I was eleven. High school was back in New York City, but by the time I went to college (Brown University in Rhode Island), my family was living in Washington, D.C.
I married young. I had just turned nineteen - just finished my sophomore year in college - when I married a Naval officer and continued the odyssey that military life requires. California. Connecticut (a daughter born there). Florida (a son). South Carolina. Finally Cambridge, Massachusetts, when my husband left the service and entered Harvard Law School (another daughter; another son) and then to Maine - by now with four children under the age of five in tow. My children grew up in Maine. So did I. I returned to college at the University of Southern Maine, got my degree, went to graduate school, and finally began to write professionally, the thing I had dreamed of doing since those childhood years when I had endlessly scribbled stories and poems in notebooks.
After my marriage ended in 1977, when I was forty, I settled into the life I have lived ever since. Today I am back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, living and writing in a house dominated by a very shaggy Tibetan Terrier named Bandit. For a change of scenery Martin and I spend time in Maine, where we have an old (it was built in 1768!) farmhouse on top of a hill. In Maine I garden, feed birds, entertain friends, and read...
My books have varied in content and style. Yet it seems that all of them deal, essentially, with the same general theme: the importance of human connections. A Summer to Die, my first book, was a highly fictionalized retelling of the early death of my sister, and of the effect of such a loss on a family. Number the Stars, set in a different culture and era, tells the same story: that of the role that we humans play in the lives of our fellow beings.
The Giver - and Gathering Blue, and the newest in the trilogy: Messenger - take place against the background of very different cultures and times. Though all three are broader in scope than my earlier books, they nonetheless speak to the same concern: the vital need of people to be aware of their interdependence, not only with each other, but with the world and its environment.
My older son was a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force. His death in the cockpit of a warplane tore away a piece of my world. But it left me, too, with a wish to honor him by joining the many others trying to find a way to end conflict on this very fragile earth.
I am a grandmother now. For my own grandchildren - and for all those of their generation - I try, through writing, to convey my passionate awareness that we live intertwined on this planet and that our future depends upon our caring more, and doing more, for one another."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 25, 2021
The hazards of a first crush, and New York with its odd dwellers
February 27, 2017
This review of The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline, Switcharound and Your Move, J.P.!, also appears on my blog, .
Ever since I finished the Anastasia Krupnik and Sam Krupnik series in 2014, I have been meaning to read more of Lois Lowry's older realistic fiction titles. When I discovered OpenLibrary.org during January's Bout of Books read-a-thon, I searched for some of her books just to see what was available, and found that all three books in her series about the Tate family were there. I wound up reading all three over the course of just a couple of days.
The first book, The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline, introduces the Tate siblings: eleven-year-old Caroline, and her older brother, J.P. After snooping in the trash can near the mailboxes, Caroline becomes convinced that a neighbor on the top floor of her apartment building is a murderer. When she learns that this same man has begun dating her single mother, Caroline and her best friend Stacey begin to make plans to unmask his true identity before Caroline and J.P. become his next victims.
In Switcharound, the second book, Caroline and J.P. are sent to stay with their father who, after divorcing from their mother, has started a whole new family which now includes a six-year-old son named Poochie and identical twin baby girls. Their dad has no real idea of what to do with Caroline and J.P., so he and his wife put them to work. J.P. must coach Poochie's baseball team, while Caroline is responsible for babysitting the twins. As both kids struggle in their assigned tasks, it becomes clear that they are each better suited to doing the other's job, and they help each other out, all while first planning revenge on their father and then trying to undo their revenge plans when they realize how much trouble they will cause.
Finally, in Your Move, J.P.!, J.P. develops a crush on Angela, a new British girl in school, and makes up a lie to impress her. As he gets deeper and deeper into his lie - which is that he has a rare disease that will one day kill him - he also begins to realize Angela's flaws. In the meantime, J.P. prepares for a major chess tournament and spends time each day visiting with a homeless man in the park, who has challenged him to name an affliction for each letter of the alphabet.
This series is similar in some ways to the Anastasia and Sam books. Both Caroline and J.P. are exceptional children with academic interests (Caroline is a budding paleontologist who hangs around the Natural History Museum, and J.P. is a chess whiz) who still sometimes make foolish mistakes. Though the two siblings don't always see eye-to-eye they do have a warm relationship, and they seem amused by each other just as often as they are annoyed by each other. The writing is also quite good in both series. Lowry has a real knack for bringing these smart and quirky characters to life, and for giving them believable and endearing flaws.
The differences between the series lies mainly in the structure of the Krupnik and Tate families. While Anastasia and Sam have parents who are very much in love and living together, the Tates are divorced and Caroline and J.P. must deal with the complications of a step-mother, half-siblings, and a mother who goes on dates. Lowry doesn't paint this situation in an overly depressing light, but the differences in family make-up do give the Tate books a different point of view.
Overall, I enjoyed all three of these books, but Switcharound was my favorite. The events of The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline were amusing, but far-fetched, while Your Move, J.P.! was more of a typical middle grade story about a first crush than anything else. Switcharound has the most emotional depth of the three, and it tells a story that is very specific to the complexities of this one particular family. Mr. Tate doesn't always treat his kids fairly during their visit, but the injustice of their being forced to work only adds to the story's appeal. There is real uncertainty about whether things will turn out okay or not, and that makes for a very compelling read.
These books were all published between 1983 and 1990, so they are definitely a bit dated, but I wouldn't say they are totally irrelevant. The character development alone makes them worth the time of a contemporary reader, and they are available as ebooks, even though it doesn't look like any print editions are available right now. Kids who are already accustomed to reading older books will have no problem jumping right into these, and even those who typically read twenty-first century middle grade paperbacks might find these a refreshing change of pace. I certainly did.
Ever since I finished the Anastasia Krupnik and Sam Krupnik series in 2014, I have been meaning to read more of Lois Lowry's older realistic fiction titles. When I discovered OpenLibrary.org during January's Bout of Books read-a-thon, I searched for some of her books just to see what was available, and found that all three books in her series about the Tate family were there. I wound up reading all three over the course of just a couple of days.
The first book, The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline, introduces the Tate siblings: eleven-year-old Caroline, and her older brother, J.P. After snooping in the trash can near the mailboxes, Caroline becomes convinced that a neighbor on the top floor of her apartment building is a murderer. When she learns that this same man has begun dating her single mother, Caroline and her best friend Stacey begin to make plans to unmask his true identity before Caroline and J.P. become his next victims.
In Switcharound, the second book, Caroline and J.P. are sent to stay with their father who, after divorcing from their mother, has started a whole new family which now includes a six-year-old son named Poochie and identical twin baby girls. Their dad has no real idea of what to do with Caroline and J.P., so he and his wife put them to work. J.P. must coach Poochie's baseball team, while Caroline is responsible for babysitting the twins. As both kids struggle in their assigned tasks, it becomes clear that they are each better suited to doing the other's job, and they help each other out, all while first planning revenge on their father and then trying to undo their revenge plans when they realize how much trouble they will cause.
Finally, in Your Move, J.P.!, J.P. develops a crush on Angela, a new British girl in school, and makes up a lie to impress her. As he gets deeper and deeper into his lie - which is that he has a rare disease that will one day kill him - he also begins to realize Angela's flaws. In the meantime, J.P. prepares for a major chess tournament and spends time each day visiting with a homeless man in the park, who has challenged him to name an affliction for each letter of the alphabet.
This series is similar in some ways to the Anastasia and Sam books. Both Caroline and J.P. are exceptional children with academic interests (Caroline is a budding paleontologist who hangs around the Natural History Museum, and J.P. is a chess whiz) who still sometimes make foolish mistakes. Though the two siblings don't always see eye-to-eye they do have a warm relationship, and they seem amused by each other just as often as they are annoyed by each other. The writing is also quite good in both series. Lowry has a real knack for bringing these smart and quirky characters to life, and for giving them believable and endearing flaws.
The differences between the series lies mainly in the structure of the Krupnik and Tate families. While Anastasia and Sam have parents who are very much in love and living together, the Tates are divorced and Caroline and J.P. must deal with the complications of a step-mother, half-siblings, and a mother who goes on dates. Lowry doesn't paint this situation in an overly depressing light, but the differences in family make-up do give the Tate books a different point of view.
Overall, I enjoyed all three of these books, but Switcharound was my favorite. The events of The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline were amusing, but far-fetched, while Your Move, J.P.! was more of a typical middle grade story about a first crush than anything else. Switcharound has the most emotional depth of the three, and it tells a story that is very specific to the complexities of this one particular family. Mr. Tate doesn't always treat his kids fairly during their visit, but the injustice of their being forced to work only adds to the story's appeal. There is real uncertainty about whether things will turn out okay or not, and that makes for a very compelling read.
These books were all published between 1983 and 1990, so they are definitely a bit dated, but I wouldn't say they are totally irrelevant. The character development alone makes them worth the time of a contemporary reader, and they are available as ebooks, even though it doesn't look like any print editions are available right now. Kids who are already accustomed to reading older books will have no problem jumping right into these, and even those who typically read twenty-first century middle grade paperbacks might find these a refreshing change of pace. I certainly did.
August 22, 2013
A CHESS GAME OF IMPRESSIVE LIES
JP Tate is instantly love-struck by a new girl in his math class--blond, British, Angela who represents his ideal of physical and social perfection. This is a cute read which will appeal to middleschool kids who wonder what it is like when you suddenly notice the opposite sex. Lowry's humor is delightful fluff; I enjoyed the Alphabetizing of Physical Ailments (inspired by Ralph, the park bum), which our youthful protagonist expands into Character Flaws. Many of the situations, conversations and examples of adolescent logic are hilarious.
Warning--the theme is serious: don't get yourself entangled in a web of lies and deceit--especially just to impress someone. True friends are those who accept you as you are and go all out to help you when you need it most. The story is school-oriented, with classroom dynamics, unusual homework assignments and special events at a small, private school. But really: walking golf bags? a chess game with the opponents wearing a ski mask and goggles to spook each other? This pleasant, single-mother family is reprised in THE ONE HUNDREDTH THING ABOUT CAROLINE, which stars JP's bright younger sister. Even adults can swallow this one and come up grinning!
(September 20, 2011. I welcome dialogue with teachers.)
JP Tate is instantly love-struck by a new girl in his math class--blond, British, Angela who represents his ideal of physical and social perfection. This is a cute read which will appeal to middleschool kids who wonder what it is like when you suddenly notice the opposite sex. Lowry's humor is delightful fluff; I enjoyed the Alphabetizing of Physical Ailments (inspired by Ralph, the park bum), which our youthful protagonist expands into Character Flaws. Many of the situations, conversations and examples of adolescent logic are hilarious.
Warning--the theme is serious: don't get yourself entangled in a web of lies and deceit--especially just to impress someone. True friends are those who accept you as you are and go all out to help you when you need it most. The story is school-oriented, with classroom dynamics, unusual homework assignments and special events at a small, private school. But really: walking golf bags? a chess game with the opponents wearing a ski mask and goggles to spook each other? This pleasant, single-mother family is reprised in THE ONE HUNDREDTH THING ABOUT CAROLINE, which stars JP's bright younger sister. Even adults can swallow this one and come up grinning!
(September 20, 2011. I welcome dialogue with teachers.)
March 11, 2016
This was a wonderful book and Lowry is a great writer. It was a simple, uncomplicated plot with a clear message which was not in the least preachy and the characters were also straight-forward and easily believed. J.P. especially was the picture of any number of boys of that age I have known, with his propensity for the quick white lie and immediate face-saving stretch of the truth. Excellent quick read.
November 18, 2009
J.P. in love for first time with new girl finds out importance of integrity and old trusted friends.
Read
April 7, 2011it boring is all i can say.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews