By Jack Gantos
Newbery Honor author of the Joey Pigza books
Jack Adrift: Fourth Grade without a Clue
Jack on the Tracks: Four Seasons of Fifth Grade
Heads or Tails: Stories from the Sixth Grade
Jack’s New Power: Stories from a Caribbean Year
Jack’s Black Book
The five books in the Jack Henry series are partly based on the diaries I (like Jack Henry) started keeping in elementary school. Some might think I have filled my alter ego’s world with oddball characters and strange situations, but to me the stories are mostly about the everyday stuff that went on in my family and in whatever nutty neighborhood we happened to be living at the time (we moved around a lot). I never thought I was special, because most of the kids I knew thought the world looked as loony and off-kilter as it did to me. Now, when I talk to kids about my family stories and neighborhood characters they still give me that knowing look which says, “The world hasn’t changed that much.” Weird stuff still happens to kids, and around kids. Weird stuff is everywhere. An eleven-year-old reader summed it up. After reading one of the books in the series, she wrote to say she had recommended the book to her friends because “Your stories are filled with the unsaid things that go on inside kids’ brains.” Who could argue with that?
—J.G.