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opticflow 's review for:
Extremities: Stories of Death, Murder, and Revenge
by David Lubar
This is a deceptively clever book.
Imagine you're in 7th, 8th, or 9th grade. You hate reading, or you struggle with reading because books are too long, the language is too hard, there's too much detail, the books people choose for you are boring. Or maybe your attention span can't hold out, you have a learning disability, you are not interested in the kinds of emotionally mature relationship plots that happen in young adult books, or some other reason you aren't able to articulate because you're pumped full of puberty. You're forced to pick a book for silent reading time in English class, and you don't want to look like you're picking a book for a 4th grader, even though that might be your actual reading level. Plus, Goosebumps books are awesome and there are a zillion of them. Why won't your teacher let you continue to read those forever? You would probably end up choosing a book that is too hard and give up, frustrated, or stare blankly at the pages thinking you're getting one over on the teacher by pretending to read.
At my middle school library I saw kids fitting these descriptions every day, and this book is a great choice to actually get these kids to read.
Logistically, this is probably a 120 page book blown up with 18 point sans serif font with wide margins and double spacing into a 200 page book, so it's not meant for teens who devour books with intricate plots. It's also got a warning label on the back saying this is not a book for kids, which will particularly appeal to exactly the kind of reader who wants to be called a teen/young adult yet is still reading books for kids. The layout and the warning label can be reassuring confidence boosters for some kids who see their peers reading 500+ page YA tomes. There are still a lot of inflexible teachers who demand their students read books over a certain number of pages, and this is a way to help struggling kids compensate.
Not all the stories in this collection are stellar, but they each deliver a gruesome death or an unexpected twist that takes the Goosebumps format one baby step closer to Stephen King. A couple of them would make good stories to read aloud in a junior high class. This book is not sophisticated at all, but then, neither are most 13 year olds.
Imagine you're in 7th, 8th, or 9th grade. You hate reading, or you struggle with reading because books are too long, the language is too hard, there's too much detail, the books people choose for you are boring. Or maybe your attention span can't hold out, you have a learning disability, you are not interested in the kinds of emotionally mature relationship plots that happen in young adult books, or some other reason you aren't able to articulate because you're pumped full of puberty. You're forced to pick a book for silent reading time in English class, and you don't want to look like you're picking a book for a 4th grader, even though that might be your actual reading level. Plus, Goosebumps books are awesome and there are a zillion of them. Why won't your teacher let you continue to read those forever? You would probably end up choosing a book that is too hard and give up, frustrated, or stare blankly at the pages thinking you're getting one over on the teacher by pretending to read.
At my middle school library I saw kids fitting these descriptions every day, and this book is a great choice to actually get these kids to read.
Logistically, this is probably a 120 page book blown up with 18 point sans serif font with wide margins and double spacing into a 200 page book, so it's not meant for teens who devour books with intricate plots. It's also got a warning label on the back saying this is not a book for kids, which will particularly appeal to exactly the kind of reader who wants to be called a teen/young adult yet is still reading books for kids. The layout and the warning label can be reassuring confidence boosters for some kids who see their peers reading 500+ page YA tomes. There are still a lot of inflexible teachers who demand their students read books over a certain number of pages, and this is a way to help struggling kids compensate.
Not all the stories in this collection are stellar, but they each deliver a gruesome death or an unexpected twist that takes the Goosebumps format one baby step closer to Stephen King. A couple of them would make good stories to read aloud in a junior high class. This book is not sophisticated at all, but then, neither are most 13 year olds.