Jack gantos author biography for book

What Would Joey Do? It's not just a funny story with nutty parents out of control, it's a poignant story of family, loss, lessons learned, and one boy's learning to make his way in the world with confidence and good cheer. This work easily stan I Am Not Joey Pigza. Joey's world is turned upside down when his deadbeat dad wins the lottery. Dead End in Norvelt.

Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans fo Hole in My Life. In the summer of , Jack Gantos was an aspiring writer looking for adventure, cash for college tuition, and a way out of a dead-end job. For ten thousand dollars, he recklessly agreed to help sail a sixty-foot yacht loaded with a ton of hashish from the Virgin Islands to New York City, where he and his partners sold the drug until federal agents Practice Makes Perfect for Rotten Ralph.

From the Newbery Medal—winning author of Dead End in Norvelt, eight side-splitting stories about a boy who is doing his best to keep his head above water Jack on the Tracks. From the Newbery Medal—winning author of Dead End in Norvelt , nine semi-autobiographical stories that will make you laugh so hard it hurts Heads or Tails. Sarah's family takes Ralph to the circus, but he misbehaves so badly that he is left there as punishment.

Unhappy as a circus performer, Ralph runs away and is found, ill and underfed, by Sarah, who welcomes him back home. While it first appears that Ralph has learned his lesson and will become less rotten, the cat ultimately reverts to his impish self. Writing in Language Arts , Ruth M. Stein called Rotten Ralph a "successful first book by both author and illustrator.

In subsequent volumes of the series, Ralph continues to get away with his naughty behavior, ruining holidays and spoiling Sarah's Show and Tell and birthday parties, and even a wedding. In each installment, the books engage even reluctant readers, adding unusual word combinations and quirky images to budding bookworms' expanding vocabularies.

In addition, the cat engages in such activities as tormenting his sweet, well-mannered cousin Percy; leading a gang of neighborhood alley cats on a day-long trouble-making spree; clawing his way into Santa's toy sack on Christmas Eve; attempting to get in top shape to beat Percy at a cat show; and stealing Aunt Martha's wedding bouquet. Fred's Feline Finishing School, where Ralph is hypnotized into good behavior; however, Sarah soon misses his mischievous spirit and lures him back into his natural state.

Rotten Ralph Feels Rotten finds the feline flat on his back with a tummy ache after a night of foraging in neighborhood garbage cans. In each of the "Rotten Ralph" books the cat behaves very much like a child, and young readers have been attracted to his gleeful overindulgence and the fact that he ultimately gets away with his crimes and is still accepted by the patient and non-confrontational Sarah.

In their review of Rotten Ralph's Rotten Christmas , Donnarae MacCann and Olga Richard stated, "Rotten Ralph may be satirizing the arrested development of the spoiled child, but the character of Sarah serves as a wry comment upon overindulgent parents. Watson noted: "It's no wonder kids love Ralph—what a perfect vicarious way to get back at all those well-meaning adults who make you go to parties where everyone else seems to be having a great time.

But at the same time it provides assurance that even in the face of bad behavior they'll still be loved—something worth talking about.

Jack gantos author biography for book

In addition to their works about Rotten Ralph, Gantos and Rubel have collaborated on several other picture books. Sleepy Ronald focuses on a little rabbit whose constant sleepiness—on roller skates, on the diving board, in the bathroom, and in rehearsals for a Wagnerian opera—brings him trouble until his friend Priscilla realizes that Ronald's ears droop over his eyes and fool him into thinking that it is nighttime.

In Aunt Bernice , young Ida's parents are going away for the summer, so her Aunt Bernice and her dog, Rex, come to babysit. Aunt Bernice's behavior—such as laughing at a mushy movie, which gets her and Ida kicked out of the theater, and dressing up as a gorilla to scare Ida's friends at a slumber party—embarrasses her niece, and Rex drools and gets his fleas all over everything.

Finally, Ida realizes that she is growing fond of Bernice and Rex despite their shortcomings. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly commented that "the spiffy nonsense of Gantos is perfectly complemented … by Rubel's nutty, brashly colored cartoons," creating "a comic masterpiece. With illustrations by frequent collaborator Nicole Rubel, Gantos's Rotten Ralph's Rotten Romance finds a crafty cat forced to suffer some misplaced affection on Valentine's Day.

In this collection of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical vignettes, Jack, who has lived in nine houses and has gone to five schools because of his dad's desire to find a better job by moving from place to place, is living in southern Florida. The text, written in diary form, is accompanied by samples of Jack's handwriting and photocopied items such as a mouse skin and a squashed bug.

Jack gets into situations with family, friends, and neighbors and at school. He fights with his know-it-all sister, attends the funeral of his maternal grandfather, sees his dog eaten by an alligator, and generally tries to do the right thing but lands in trouble. Calling Jack "a survivor, an 'everyboy' whose world may be wacko but whose heart and spirit are eminently sane and generous," School Library Journal 's Cart called Heads or Tails a "memorable book" and Gantos a "terrific writer with a wonderfully wry sensibility, a real talent for turning artful phrases, and a gift for creating memorable characters.

In Jack's New Power: Stories from a Caribbean Year Jack and his family move to Barbados, where Jack makes new friends, thinks his parents are lost at sea, gets his heart broken, sees his dad rescue a drowning couple who turn out to be English royalty, loses his birthday money to a shady friend of his father's, and searches for a lost boy who turns up dead.

He also thinks that he has gained the power to make things happen and, in the process of trying to be a man, conquers his fear of horses. As in the first volume, Gantos presents readers with both laughable moments and serious thoughts. Writing in Booklist , Susan Dove Lempke wrote that "the eight stories here convey with sharp humor Jack's uncomfortable yet exhilarating early adolescence" and concluded that readers will "anxiously await the next installment of Jack's life.

Watson added in Horn Book that, as in the first book in the collection, "the first-person narrative authentically reproduces the language and observations of twelve year olds. Quirky and funny with some good advice subtly inserted. Deciding that he wants to be a serious writer, he buys a black book in which to write a novel. His junior high, a former detention center, is a magnet school for students training in shop; consequently, the pressure is on him to do well in this subject.

Jack makes a dog coffin for his class project, and then has to dig out his dead dog in order to pass the seventh grade. Rotten Ralph was the first published book for both creators and the first of about ten in the Rotten Ralph series as of Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version.

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