I am desperately trying to recall the name of a book I believe I read in my youth (I suspect in middle school so most likely a YA novel) in which a plot point turns on the plagiarism of a book report by the protagonist that is to be the final assignment of the year (possibly of seventh grade). The assignment in question is simply to write a book report on any book (I remember being confused by the lack of constraints and specificity in the assignment and this felt like a detail that aged the book. I likely read the book in the mid- or early nineties, but suspect it was written in the seventies. ) At the library to select a book for his assignment, the protagonist looks over a book -- which I believe to be Johnny Tremain, though I am not 100% certain -- and notices that the novel's plot is neatly summarized on the back cover. He checks it out and returns home, but puts off the assignment for several days. Anxious to be done with his assigned work for the year, rather than actually reading the book, the protagonist eventually caves and copies the summary from the book's back cover, submitting the work as his own. (Again, I believe the book from/for which the protagonist plagiarized his assignment is Johnny Tremain but I am not 100% sure. ) When his misdeed is discovered, the protagonist's teacher takes pity and agrees not to flunk him for the year, so long as he spends his summer successfully writing original book reports on ten different books as punishment.
As I recall, it is essentially a coming of age novel; most of the story transpires throughout the course of the summer and the ten reports serve as time markers or a leitmotif of sorts as the protagonist matures throughout the summer-- possibly coming to terms with disruptive changes in his family/home life during the process -- and by the end of the summer he has, if not quite become an enthusiastic reader, at least become so adept at quickly reading and summarizing novels that he cannot believe that just several months earlier he found the task so onerous and burdensome as to be driven to commit plagiarism rather than suffer through the reading and summarizing of a single novel. Sadly, I recall very little else about the book but this one plot point, other than that the main character's home life was perhaps somewhat tumultuous, or at least that he seemed to lack for a father figure, which the teacher perhaps senses and attempts to step in as a surrogate in some capacity. As such, his parents' separation or impending divorce may have been a plot point but I can't recall with certainty. Baseball may have been a significant theme as well in some capacity but I am not certain about this either.
Sadly I can recall absolutely nothing else about the book. I had not thought of it in years, but something I encountered in a podcast recently sparked my memory of this plot point -- specifically a supposedly unrelated anecdote about an attempted plagiarism by a middle schooler of an assigned book report on Johnny Tremain -- and of the book as somewhat formative for me. My clear memory of this isolated narrative set against my utter inability to recall anything else about the book in question has been bedeviling me. If you can help me in any way I will be forever in your debt.
