In a Florida middle school, on a Tuesday in October, Marcus Whitfield is demoted.
For nine years he has been an administrator. Now he is being sent to teach seventh-grade reading - a class whose teacher died of COVID, whose substitute walked out, and whose twenty-eight students have not been taught in months.
He has five months until the state exam.
He has a stone passed to him by a girl who buried her brother in March.
And he has the slow, terrifying conviction that children are not what they have been told they are. They are what one adult convinces them they can become.
The Convincing is a debut novel about what one teacher can do when they decide a child is capable of something great. From educator and school administrator David L. Thomas - drawn from seventeen years inside real Florida classrooms - comes a story for every teacher who ever walked into a room they did not ask for and decided to stay.