DUDE!

Now here’s a sub-genre that doesn’t need to grow. Saving malls from alien robots, practicing the accordion while tied to a chair with dish towels, risking life to face the Great Water Panther are three stories in this anthology of prose, poetry and plays intended for boys, mostly on the lower end of the suggested age range. Following Jon Scieszka’s Guys Write for Guys Read (2005) and stemming from a concern that boys don’t read as much as girls and don’t have enough adult male readers as role models, anthologies such as this are being packaged to meet a supposed demand. But boys don’t tend to read short stories in anthologies, and writing down to them serves readers poorly. Some of the writers here are offering their first prose stories or giving a new genre a try, and more established writers have not given their best efforts. Boys today will read what boys have always read: good, well-written novels, as Paulsen, Hobbs, Rowling, Jacques, Snicket, Gantos and others know. (contributors and their work) (Anthology. 8-12)