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    Guys Read: The Bloody Souvenir: A Short Story from Guys Read: Funny Business
    Guys Read: The Bloody Souvenir: A Short Story from Guys Read: Funny Business
    Guys Read: The Bloody Souvenir: A Short Story from Guys Read: Funny Business
    Ebook29 pages24 minutes

    Guys Read: The Bloody Souvenir: A Short Story from Guys Read: Funny Business

    By Jack Gantos, Adam Rex and Jon Scieszka

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Jack isn’t like the Pagoda brothers. He knows the difference between fun and stupid. Launching yourself across the backyard in a makeshift Roman catapult? Fun. Smoking an entire pack of cigarettes as fast as possible? Stupid. But when it comes to emergency self-surgery…Jack still has something to learn. A short story from the acclaimed collection Guys Read: Funny Business, edited by Jon Scieszka.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 14, 2011
    ISBN9780062111579
    Guys Read: The Bloody Souvenir: A Short Story from Guys Read: Funny Business
    Author

    Jack Gantos

    Jack Gantos is the celebrated author of Joey Pigza Loses Control, a Newbery Honor Book. He is also the author of the popular picture books about Rotten Ralph, and Jack's Black Book, the latest in his acclaimed series of semi-autobiographical story collections featuring his alter ego, Jack Henry. Mr. Gantos lives with his wife and daughter in Boston, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for Guys Read

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    • 4/5
      I surprised myself by enjoying the majority of these stories. Even the ones I didn't like weren't all that bad, either.My favorites:"Will" by Adam Rex was super good. I didn't want that one to end, and would love to read a full-blown novel version."Artemis Begins" by Eoin Colfer was also really good, and not just because I'm an Artemis Fowl fan."Your Question for Author Here" by Kate DiCamillo and Jon Scieszka. LOVED this one. I'm a sucker for letter stories, but this one was really well done."A Fistful of Feathers" by David Yoo genuinely scared me. Very disturbing.Like I said, the rest of the stories weren't bad. I would recommend the anthology not just to boys, but girls too.
    • 4/5
      Perfect for most 9-12 year-old boys, also pretty darn funny even for a mom. Dramatic, crude, stupid - and laugh-out-loud funny. I am thankful that one story was about a boy who wasn't as macho as the others.
    • 4/5
      Contains daily essays on children's book recommendations for toddlers through teens alongside events and activities for every day of the year. Seems like a really fantastic resource to follow, especially as someone who constantly needs ideas for storytime. The site is easy to use either casually or to create booklists with the search feature that allows the user to pull up books by author, age, subject, or type of book.
    • 4/5
      October 2010 SLJ: Gr 5-8?
      Building on the success of Guys Write for Guys Read (Viking, 2005), Scieszka continues his mission to take the ?reluctant? out of readers with this first volume of the ?Guys Read Library.? For this title, Scieszka invited some of today?s top writers of children?s fiction to contribute a humorous short story. Not surprisingly, the resulting compilation has something for everyone. Looking for a story heavy on the ick-factor? Suggest Jack Gantos?s ?The Bloody Souvenir,? in which the Pagoda brothers return to wreak more havoc. David Yoo?s ?A Fistful of Feathers? features a bloodthirsty turkey intent on destroying the narrator?s life. Eoin Colfer offers an autobiographical piece that shares how his younger brother was his real-life inspiration for Artemis Fowl. Kate DiCamillo and Scieszka team up to offer a hilarious correspondence between Joe and an author who knows how to hold her own with unmotivated students. While these shorter stories may not have the liveliness of the authors? full novels, each one is solid, and more importantly, it offers an introduction to that author?s style and voice. Don?t be surprised if students come seeking longer works by David Lubar, Christopher Paul Curtis, and other contributors after sampling them in this collection. Scieszka promises future volumes featuring other genres, among them nonfiction, sports, and action/adventure.?Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA

    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book of humorous short stories and will be able to find many ways to use this with my middle school students! Loved the Jon Scieszka and Kate diCamillo story with the letters to the author! So cool!
    • 5/5
      This is a collection of stories by various children's authors, such as Adam Rex, Eoin Colfer, David Lubar, etc. While there were a couple of stories that were just so-so for me, most of them were freaking hilarious. I was laughing out loud through most of the book and ended up reading a couple of stories to my daughters because they just had to know what I was laughing about. I especially liked David Yoo's story of the boy being ousted from his family by a macho turkey and Sciezka and DiCamillo's collaborative story that parodies the book Dear Mr. Henshaw. The only think I didn't like about the book was that Jeff Kinney's story was left out of this advanced review copy . . . but you better believe I will be getting the final version.Though the recommended age range for the book is 8-12, I felt like some of the stories were more for older kids. I think this would be a perfect book for middle-schoolers -- boys and girls!

    Book preview

    Guys Read - Jack Gantos

    The Bloody Souvenir

    By Jack Gantos

    A Short Story from

    Guys Read: Funny Business

    Volume 1 of the Guys Read Library of Great Reading

    Edited by Jon Scieszka

    With an illustration by Adam Rex

    Contents

    Cover

    Title Page

    THE BLOODY SOUVENIR

    Guys E-Read

    Biographies

    Back Ad

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    THE BLOODY SOUVENIR

    BY JACK GANTOS

    My mother was right. I was not my own man. I was a spineless follower just as she had always said. I was a boy who was easily led astray. I liked hanging around with dangerous kids who were full of insanely feral ideas that ended in disaster, and I felt lucky that we had recently moved next door to the two most dangerous guys in the world, the Pagoda brothers. Frankie was a skinny, innocent-looking kid who was my age, even though he was covered with about a hundred years’ worth of bruises. We were in the same sixth-grade class, though I didn’t see him much because he mostly only showed up for lunch and to take his afternoon nap in the puke-smelling nurse’s office. Gary Pagoda was in eighth grade, but I was never sure of his age. Maybe he was fifteen or eighteen or even twenty. It was impossible to tell. He had a lot of scar tissue on his face. When I looked at his mouth full of chipped teeth, I thought he might even be twenty-five. But when you considered how he behaved, he might just have been a supersized six-year-old psychopath. One thing I did know is that he had already been to prison. The other thing I knew was that I was vastly jealous that I hadn’t been to prison, too, because that

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