Guys Write For Guys Read

Book Cover: 

Book Title: Guys Write For Guys Read

Book Summary:

Is a mash up of male authors stories about male characters, which is a rarity in the book world.  All they stories are relatable to what male students go through in middle school and in high school.  After each story there is a super brief bio of each author, even giving three books that the author has written in hopes to aspire them to read those books as well.   

APA Reference:

Scieszka, Jon (2005). Guys Write for Guys Read. New York: Penguin Group.

My Impressions:  This is a great book to try to show you boy readers that not all books are based on girls and their problems.  That they to can be the focus of a story and not be the dumb ones in the story.  This is great and even though I am a girl I still found that the issues in this book are also relevant to girls too.  It also helps the girls see problems from another perspective. 

Professional Review:

Gr 5-9-Scieszka has put together a diverse and fast-paced anthology of scribblings and stories that deserves a permanent place in any collection serving middle graders. The book features brief contributions from scores of heavyweight authors and illustrators like Walter Dean Myers, Dan Gutman, Chris Crutcher, Avi, Brian Jacques, Dav Pilkey, Stephen King, Daniel Pinkwater, Jerry Spinelli, Will Hobbs, Chris Van Allsburg, Laurence Yep, and frequent collaborator Lane Smith. If there's one overarching theme here, it's the simple but important message: "read what you like, when you like, whatever that happens to be." Several other themes reappear in multiple selections. Among them are the importance of fathers, what it is to become a "real" man, how childhood reading predicted and shaped an author's future, adventures and misadventures in sports, why it's okay to be a "guy's guy," and, conversely, never being a "guy's guy" and finding out that that's okay, too. Boys who are constantly doodling-even when they're not supposed to-will be particularly inspired by contributions from successful illustrators like Tony DiTerlizzi, Timothy Basil Ering, and Brert Helquist, who've dug up their old, shaky drawings from parents' attics to show boys just what they were creating when they were kids. While the anthology arguably contains not one single masterpiece, there's something undeniably grand about this collective celebration of the intellectual life of the common boy.-Jeffrey Hastings, Highlander Way Middle School, Howell, MI

Citation:

Hastings, J. (2005). Guys write for guys read: Boys' favorite authors write about being boys. School Library Journal, 51(4), 140. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/211756016?accountid=7113

Library Uses: I would have the students write their own stories about a moment in their life.