Tripping over the Lunch Lady: And Other School Stories
An anthology of ten short stories by some of the best children's authors out there, this book is a winner. The stories -- every one of them -- are laugh-out-louders. Sometimes the laughs are "boy, do I know how that feels" ones. And sometimes they're pure, rip-snortin' brays of hilarity.
Either way, they resonate. Middle-grade readers know the torture of reciting poetry in front of the whole classroom, the alternating agony and ecstasy of crushes, the misery of not fitting in. They'll root for the kids in these stories.
There's a delicious mystery (Lee Wardlaw's "The Desk"), a story about the shame of being in Special Reading (Susan Shreve's "The Girls' Room") and a wonderfully weird story featuring a kidnapping, a surprising marriage, and truly terrible spelling (Avi's "How I got my english A").
For me, the biggest laughs were found in the comic-book style "The Grade School Zone," written by James Proimos and illustrated by David Fremont. In this hilarious piece, readers are treated to a side-splittingly funny day in the life of a boy and his grandmother. Did I mention it was funny? The facial expressions are priceless.
Each story is followed by a "School Report," in which readers discover the author's favorite and least favorite classes, the best pranks he or she ever played, and the "worst smell at school," among other things. There's also an old school picture, for most of them. It's a really nice touch -- it's fun for readers to see the authors as real people who were real kids.
