Jake Drake, Bully Buster

Jake Drake, Bully Buster is the novel that begins Andrew Clements’s Jake Drake series. There are four novels in total. Jake Drake, Bully Buster was published in April 2001. Jake Drake, Know-It-All, was published next, in September of 2001. A month later, the final two novels in the series—Jake Drake, Teacher’s Pet and Jake Drake, Class Clown—were published. These novels focus on the relationships and school life of elementary student Jake Drake. They follow him as he uses his intelligence, sense of humor, and perseverance to overcome the kinds of difficulties with teachers and peers that many young people face.

The novels do not follow a strict chronology of Jake’s school years—instead, each novel focuses on a different issue that Jake faces and covers whichever elementary school years are relevant to that particular issue. For instance, Jake Drake, Bully Buster is narrated from Jake’s perspective in fourth grade, but he mentions bullies he encountered in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade before telling the story of his second-grade encounter with Link Baxter—the bully whose brief reign of terror forms the center of the novel’s plot. The rest of the novels in the series follow this same pattern—fourth-grader Jake identifies an issue he encountered in the past and then flashes back to tell the story.