Valerie Stadick, owner of Main Street Books in Minot, N.D., is eager to introduce her customers to The Fourth Stall: Part II, due this month from HarperCollins’s Walden Pond Press. The fact that its writer, Chris Rylander, is a local author gives the book extra appeal.

Rylander does a great job of really getting into the psyche of Mac, a sixth-grade boy who sets up shop in the fourth stall of a bathroom located in a wing of his school that is no longer used. He helps kids solve their problems—with a teacher, or a bully—and charges them for his services. The book has a mobster kind of a feel. Mac is kind of an Al Capone character—but with a good heart. The author captures the voice of middle schoolers really well. I found the book laugh-out-loud funny and very clever.

I think that the novel has a bit of everything in it—it’s full of interesting characters, has a nice plot, and moves very quickly. There are lots of references to baseball, since the author is a big Cubs fan. Mac’s sidekick, Vince, is quite into Cubs trivia. I think a lot of times sports replace reading for boys around the sixth grade, and it’s nice to find books that have a sports element to them, to grab their attention and keep them reading. Even though the primary focus of this novel isn’t sports, I feel the book does that.

I will definitely be handselling this. Not only is the author local, but one of my booksellers went to school with him, and Rylander asked him if he could name a character in the novel after him. He said yes—as long as he made that person evil! I can see fans of Al Capone Does My Shirts and Al Capone Shines My Shoes really liking this novel. I will recommend it for the 9 to 12 age group, but I’ll recommend it to older boys as well, and even to adults. I began reading the novel at 9:00 one night and before I knew it, it was 1:00 in the morning. That’s saying quite a bit for a 52-year-old woman reading a book about the sixth grade, but Rylander really transported me back. The novel kept me up—and kept me laughing.

The Fourth Stall, Part II by Chris Rylander. HarperCollins/Walden Pond Press, $15.99 Feb. ISBN 978-0-06-199630-6