When fourteen-year-old Zanna Mayfield gets an acceptance letter from St. Pommeroy’s School for Gifted Children, she jumps at the chance to put her considerable intellect to good use. But nothing can prepare her for the first day, when she discovers that she is a Scientist —one able to see and bend the basic functions of the universe like velocity, gravity, and chemical reactions to her own purposes. As Zanna struggles to make friends and learn how to use her abilities at her new school, her troubles multiply when a mysterious stranger begins stalking her, dead set on keeping Zanna out of St. Pommeroy’s. If Zanna has any hope of finishing her first year, she’ll need to master every function she can get her mind around—including the one that defines Zanna herself.
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The Zanna Function
Daniel Wheatley
Every so often I read a book that I well and truly love. For me this is what The Zanna Function brought me. Middle Grade isn’t often my first choice but this plot intrigued me (although it did turn out different that expected!) and I decided to give it a shot. I was pleasently surprised and I found a book that I will happily push onto all the children in my family.
The main stand out for me was that our main character and three of her closest friends at school are all girls. And they are all amazing at maths and science, and even though they’re shown to have strengths and weaknesses in certain areas they help each other out with the weaknesses rather than turn it into a competition. With the ever lowering rates of women going into STEM subjects, this book is so vital to show young kids that being a scientist kind of makes you have superpowers and that it’s an aspirational study and career choice.
The females in this book are also immensely strong. They know their own minds, what they want and how they’re going to achieve it. Zanna is constantly on the ball making up plans and doing things that she’s scared of to complete them. Zanna is a wonderful role model in the book and I really routed for her throughout (even when some of her decisions weren’t as clever!). The book also shows you can mistakes, but you learn from them and can better yourself.
The pacing of the book was a little bit all over the place, it kept slowing, and then racing ahead. This wasn’t too bad as I did read it over two nights before bed so it didn’t slow the read down. But I did feel like just putting the book down at some points because it felt like it was dragging slightly. This is probably to do with my other complaint. There’s a lot of terminology and actual mathematical terms in this book. As someone who’s done A Level maths I sometimes struggled. BUT I think this is because I did A Level maths… I spent a bit too much time overthinking these terms as I was already familiar with them. So hopefully for a younger reader this wouldn’t be an issue!
I loved that scientific functions were used as the magic system in this book. It felt unique, yet familiar because of the logical approach. There’s clear limits with what the scientists can do with this kind of power, and we’re taught a lot about it along with Zanna in school. I was slightly shocked that Pops wasn’t as shocked about the whole thing throughout the book, but I guess this is for kids and we want to show a positive openminded guardian for Zanna.
Overall I just really loved the book, it was whimsical and magical whilst also being stuffed full of logic and puzzles. I enjoyed the overarching story as well as the different character stories we get throughout.
POSITIVES
+ Intriguing magic system
+ Strong female characters
+ Female scientists and mathematicians
NEGATIVES
– Overly complex sometimes
– Uneven pace
I received The Zanna Function by Daniel Wheatley from the publisher via Netgalley. This is an unbiased and honest review
