You Ugly!

People don't typically like being described as ugly....but what about dogs?  Sometimes it can come across as a term of endearment, "that scraggly mutt is nothing but ugly, but he's mine."  Even though he claims he meant it as an insult, I think this was the spirit in which Jake took to calling the family dog Jim Ugly.

Sid Fleischman's Jim Ugly is the story of Jake and his dog as they try to understand the mysterious circumstances surrounding Jake's father's "death."  Don't freak out over the quotation marks, this book is a mystery, my treatment of the word death gives you no more information than you would get simply by knowing the genre.  Along the way Jake gets swept up into the company of actors and starts to fall in love with life on stage.

Jim Ugly is a on the Reading Olympics book list for this year and after reading it I must say I am a little surprised.  It's a great story but a very easy read.  Now don't get yourself all in a huff I am a HUGE fan of easy reads.  In fact I am OVERJOYED that this is an easy read because it is almost impossible to find books that are socially appropriate (aka something that an 8th grader would actually want to read) but easy enough for a struggling reader to understand.  However, the Reading Olympics program tends to target the advanced readers and I fear they may not appreciate the simple nature of the story.

More appropriate for Reading Olympics would be one of Fleischman's other works Escape The Story of the Great Houdini.  This piece of non-fiction is packed with information, primary sources, and masterfully spins the tale of the great magician's life.  Houdini was a name I recognized and knew was a magician, but thanks to this book I am now fascinated by this man who lead such a (at the risk of sounding corny) magical life.  Not magic in the sense of a kid's birthday party performer but a true illusionist always searching for the next best trick.

In Jim Ugly the reader gets to know exactly what happens (still not a spoiler), but in Escape I still have to wonder how Houdini pulled off all of those stunts.

Figuring it out...that's kids stuff. 

PS If Fleischman sounds familiar it's because he's a Newbery winner.  This will jog your memory.