By Jon Scieszka
Buy new: $12.47
120 used and new from $0.01
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First tagged by Rajiv "rajiv_thatsme"
Customer tags: time warp trio, childrens books, jon scieszka, lane smith
Review & Description
Joe, Fred, and Sam have no idea why they've been transported to a playground. All they know is that there's a 250-pound chicken and it's headed straight for them. While Joe's racking his brains for the magic words to stop a charging chicken, he suddenly has a flash of what's going to happen next. It's exactly like the book he just read. Turns out Fred put their summer reading list inside The Book (the magic one, that is)--and now they're destined to spend their summer living stories that were only meant to be read. Only one thing is clear: writing a back-to-school book report will be no sweat. Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith also collaborated on Math Curse, The Stinky Cheese Man, and The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs. Jon Scieszka lives in Brooklyn, New York. Lane Smith lives in New York City. Sam, Fred, and Joe--the Time Warp Trio--find themselves face-to-beak with a giant, 266-pound chicken ... who, unfortunately, looks hungry. As the chicken begins to chase them, the boys realize with horror that they are smack-dab in the middle of Daniel Pinkwater's The Hoboken Chicken Emergency! How did they get there? Fred accidentally stuck the school's summer reading list between the pages of "The Book"--a time-warping, green-mist-expelling book that triggers time travel in all of Jon Scieszka's well-loved Time Warp Trio action-adventures.
In Summer Reading Is Killing Me!, illustrated by innovative artist Lane Smith, the boys find themselves trapped in a dreadfully skewed literary world where Joe, the narrator, says "I saw Homer Price being carried by the Headless Horseman. Dracula was dragging Winnie the Pooh in a headlock. Mr. Twit was breaking Harold's Purple Crayon." It becomes the boys' charge to find "The Book" and yank the summer reading list out of it before children's literature is destroyed forever as the "bad" characters knock off the "good" characters and take over the stories. The literary references accelerate to a breakneck pace: "We stepped over a very hungry caterpillar eating his way through a dictionary.... We made our way through a crowd of Robinson Crusoe, a blue moose, Julie with some wolves, a snowman, a plain and tall lady named Sarah, a kid with a hatchet, and a very confused-looking Robin Hood helping Eeyore reattach his tail." Whether or not young readers register every literary allusion is inconsequential--Summer Reading Is Killing Me! is a rollicking, sarcastic, ultraweird, suspenseful adventure that kids will like regardless. And for teachers, parents, and librarians who are deeply enmeshed in kid-erature--it's purely delicious. (Ages 8 and older) --Karin Snelson Read more
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