Heads or Tails: Stories from the Sixth Grade - Softcover

Jack Gantos has written books for people of all ages, from picture books and middle-grade fiction to novels for young adults and adults. His works include Hole in My Life, a memoir that won the Michael L. Printz and Robert F. Sibert Honors, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, a National Book Award Finalist, and Joey Pigza Loses Control, a Newbery Honor book.  Jack was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, and when he was seven, his family moved to Barbados. He attended British schools, where there was much emphasis on reading and writing, and teachers made learning a lot of fun. When the family moved to south Florida, he found his new classmates uninterested in their studies, and his teachers spent most of their time disciplining students. Jack retreated to an abandoned bookmobile (three flat tires and empty of books) parked out behind the sandy ball field, and read for most of the day. The seeds for Jack’s writing career were planted in sixth grade, when he read his sister’s diary and decided he could write better than she could. He begged his mother for a diary and began to collect anecdotes he overheard at school, mostly from standing outside the teachers’ lounge and listening to their lunchtime conversations. Later, he incorporated many of these anecdotes into stories.  While in college, he and an illustrator friend, Nicole Rubel, began working on picture books. After a series of well-deserved rejections, they published their first book, Rotten Ralph, in 1976. It was a success and the beginning of Jack’s career as a professional writer. Jack continued to write children’s books and began to teach courses in children’s book writing and children’s literature. He developed the master’s degree program in children’s book writing at Emerson College and the Vermont College M.F.A. program for children’s book writers. He now devotes his time to writing books and educational speaking. He lives with his family in Boston, Massachusetts.

Grade 5-8-A book that reads like an improbably successful collaboration between Betsy Byars and William Sleator: funny but ...weird! Set in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, sometime in the late '60s, these eight stories about an appealing sixth grader named Jack are filled with oddball characters and offbeat situations: neighbors, for example, keep 30 dogs (in the house), paint an atom bomb target on the roof, and drive cars on their lawn. Jack's world is not only weird, it's rootless. He's lived in nine different houses and attended five schools in six years-and, some days, it's even dangerously out of control: a plane falls out of the sky and the pilot is killed; the family's dog is eaten by an alligator; younger brother Pete keeps getting injured while in his care-no wonder Jack always thinks the worst and wistfully believes in UFOs, hoping "they'll take me away from all this confusion and set me down in a place without fear." And yet Jack, like the watch that takes a licking, always keeps on ticking, performing acts of unselfconscious kindness. He's a survivor, an "everyboy" whose world may be wacko but whose heart and spirit are eminently sane and generous. Gantos is a terrific writer with a wonderfully wry sensibility, a real talent for turning artful phrases, and a gift for creating memorable characters. In the first story Jack thinks, "I can either be a copycat for the rest of my life or I can be one-of-a-kind." By the final story, readers will realize that he has become the latter and so has this memorable book about him.
Michael Cart, formerly at Beverly Hills Public Library
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