Guys Read (Thriller) edited by Jon Scieszka
Review by Chris Singer
About the editor:
Jon Scieszka is the National Ambassador for Children's Literature emeritus and the bestselling author of more than twenty-five books for kids, including The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, Math Curse, Robot Zot!, and the Time Warp Trio series. Jon founded Guys Read to encourage a passion for reading among young boys, with the philosophy that boys love to read most when they are reading things they love. A former elementary school teacher, Jon lives in Brooklyn with his family.
About the book:
This is the second installment in Jon Scieszka's Guys Read Library. If you've read volume one, Guys Read: Funny Business, you already know what you're in store for: ten stories from young readers' favorite writers. In Guys Read: Thriller, you'll find a teenage terrorist, the world's worst private detective, a roomful of snakes, and more, from the likes of M.T. Anderson, Patrick Carman, Gennifer Choldenko, Matt de la Pena, Margaret Peterson Haddix, Bruce Hale, Anthony Horowitz, Jarrett Krosoczka, Walter Dean Myers, and James Patterson, not to mention illustrations from Brett Helquist.
My take on the book:
This latest book in the Guys Read series is an incredibly entertaining anthology. I was really impressed with the diversity of the stories in this volume. The stories differ in style, location, ethnicity and moods. There's a lot of variety in this collection and definitely something for every middle reader.
I was really pleased to see a few of my favorite authors included in this series (Walter Dean Myers and Jarrett Krosoczka). There were also a few authors in this anthology I wasn't familiar with so their inclusion here was a nice introduction for me. I especially enjoyed Patrick Carman's "Ghost Vision Glasses." It was not only a terrific read, but a great way to end this collection. Another of my favorites was Matt De La Pena's "Believing in Brooklyn." De La Pena was completely new to me and this story has motivated me to check out more of his work.
Teachers and librarians should welcome this anthology into their classroom with open arms. The stories make excellent read-alouds and librarians can display other books written by the authors in this collection. Just maybe one of these stories could spark a middle reader to want to check out more books from an author they enjoyed, which is exactly the purpose of Jon Scieszka's Guys Read series. Every story included in here has the potential to do that, which makes it a must-have in opinion.
