'Knucklehead' Scieszka Gets Boys Into Books

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October 6, 2:42 PM

by Diane Petryk Bloom, Children's Book Examiner

 

 

    Here’s a just-out book you can get for your reluctant-reader guys ages 9 –12, say.  And don’t exactly give it to them. Just leave it laying around the house as if it’s for someone else. They’ll see its wild comic-book like cover and pick it up.

    It’s award-winning author Jon Scieszka’s hilarious memoir Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Mostly True Stories About Growing Up Scieszka.

    That happened in Flint, Michigan, when Scieszka, now 54, and his five brothers were raised amid comic books and Catholics. Throw in lazy summers at the lake, babysitting misadventures, TV shows, spending allowances on Hardy Boys books, and jokes at family dinners, his publisher says, and the result is this kid-friendly trip down memory lane that provides a unique glimpse at the formation of a creative mind and free spirit.

   Scieszka went to Albion College in Michigan, then Columbia University in New York City. He appeared on children’s book radar in 1989 with The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! That book, told from the perspective of the wolf, along with The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, put his wicked sense of elementary humor in the hands of millions of young readers, according to the Detroit Free Press.

    He’s also the author of the Time Warp Trio series. But Scieszka was first an elementary school teacher, where he noticed that boys were choosing not to read.

    It was part a guy thing, he said, because elementaries, libraries and children’s book publishing even, are dominated by women.

   Boys moms read to them. Books were a girl thing anyway you looked at it.

   Then Scieszka put on cape and flew to the rescue. In 2001 he founded Guys Read, a grassroots literacy organization and Web site (guysread.com) devoted to getting boys to read by letting the book come to the boy -- not the other way around

   But don’t blame only “women’s worlds.”

   "It's part sociological, part biological too," he told the Free Press. "Being a teacher, I realized boys just developmentally are not ready to be readers as early as girls are. I saw little girls in kindergarten and first grade just start ripping through stuff, but they could also sit quietly and had great small-motor skills.

   "And boys are jumping around and their electric system isn't even wired yet, their whole nervous system. Which explains why they're not good readers, and then they'd choose not to read because they couldn't, and it was just kind of a downward spiral from there."

   Scieszka’s efforts toward boy-literacy were noticed. This January he was named national ambassador for young people’s literature by the Library of Congress' Center for the Book and the Children's Book Council.  Scieszka will promote literacy and kid lit across the nation for two years.

   Scieszka says it doesn’t matter a bit what kids’ read as long as they’re reading.

   “…let your kid read every motorcycle book that was ever written. Let him read every shark book that ever was. Let him read Calvin and Hobbes,' " Scieszka said. “The most important thing is that boys are reading something…”

   Perhaps even Knucklehead.

   Which, true to Scieszka-style, turns the idea of a memoir on its ear, the Free Press said, “being written in easily digested vignettes crafted to have kids -- boys especially -- giggling with recognition and perhaps a twinge of jealousy for a simpler time not dominated by PlayStation, but by games like slaughter ball and activities like lighting model airplanes on fire.

   School Library Journal says Knucklehead, a silly and sweet homage to family life, is not to be missed.

   Your boys will read it.

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