My 4th grade daughter and I picked this up and just loved reading it together. It reminded me a bit of Lois Lowry's -The Giver in the sense that sometimes it got us thinking so far out, but it seemed, shorter and more manageable in subject matter than The Giver. You can't escape parts of the book's harshness that really got her (my daughter) thinking about how she might judge classmates that might act the same way as John. Her school has many potential "Johns" that maybe now, she can begin to understand. Excellent book!