Knucklehead…

I recently finished the autobiography Knucklehead: Tall Tales & Mostly True Stories About Growing Up Scieszka. If you haven’t read anything by Jon Scieszka, you really should. You might want to get your feet wet with The True Story of the Three Little Pigs or The Stinky Cheese Man, or his series The Time Warp Trio. Once you get a feel for his voice and character as a writer, Knucklehead will make you roll on the floor with laughter.

He focuses his book on growing up with five brothers. Yes, six boys in all, going to Catholic school, being parented by his mom, a nurse, and his father, a school principal. You can imagine the chaos. One of the best chapters details the challenge of dressing up in Halloween costumes. With that many kids, costumes were hard to come by, and to top it all off, one of the costumes was a witch. As Mr. Scieszka writes, “You had to be talked into this outfit before you were old enough to realize that witches were girls.” The book includes wonderful photos of Jon’s early years, and yes, there is one of him in the witch costume!