By Jon Scieszka
Jon Scieszka grew up as one of six brothers, and here are thirty-eight very short true stories about how that went.
Six boys. One bathroom. Their father called all of them knuckleheads and that is the title. The stories are two or three pages each and they go like this: the car trip where a brother, a cat and a pecan nut log combine into a vomiting disaster. The heater that got peed on. Gregg's broken collarbone, with the actual x-ray printed next to it. The time they phoned the Bad Boys' Home to scare the brother they were meant to be minding. Catholic school. Hand-me-downs. Army men. Every chapter has photographs and clip art and fake advertisements stuck around it, so it looks less like a book and more like somebody's box of stuff.
Personal narrative usually arrives as a demand for four hundred words about your summer, and the children who most need to write are the ones who go silent. Scieszka fixes that by proving the form can be three pages long, entirely about something disgusting, and still count. The chapters are short enough to read in one go and short enough to imitate by lunchtime. There is no lesson at the end of any of them. And because it is a real man's real childhood with the photographs to prove it, the argument that nothing interesting has ever happened to them stops working — nothing interesting happened to Scieszka either, and he got a book out of it.