So it comes as no surprise that, when I spotted this on the junior nonfiction shelves at the library last week, I snatched it up. It's also not surprising that I read the first three chapters before we even left the library. Or that I swallowed up the rest of it in no time at all.
Fleischman's own love of the absurd, the fanciful, and the ridiculous-yet-believable makes him the ideal biographer for Mark Twain. Both Twain and Fleischman are able satirists, great at telling a funny story that you laugh and laugh over, only later to realize that they were teaching you something at the same time as they were tickling your funny bone. The Trouble Begins at 8 focuses on Samuel Clemens' metamorphosis from human tumbleweed who acquired and abandoned jobs freely to a celebrated humorist, lecturer, and novelist. Yes, this is written at a middle-grade level, and yes, adults will get a big kick out of it too.
If This Was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for mentions of drinking alcohol, smoking cigars, and western violence.
My mom read By the Great Horn Spoon! aloud to us too!
ReplyDeleteWhat fun! I've been thinking it might be the next thing I read aloud to my kids.
DeleteI loved By the Great Horn Spoon! I made both my brothers read it and they both loved it too. I really need to read more of his books! I picked up one from the thrift store last year but never got around to reading it...
ReplyDeletePhyl, I also loved Jingo Django and Humbug Mountain. The Whipping Boy was awesome too, but I didn't find it as funny. My son really enjoyed his McBroom tall tales a few years ago, too. I think the only book of his I've read and not really, really liked was The Thirteenth Floor, which was just okay.
DeleteI haven't read anything by this author before, but you've certainly intrigued me! Mark Twain is just a fascinating man, isn't he? :)
ReplyDeleteKara, Mark Twain was such an odd duck, but he definitely intrigues me.
DeleteFleischman is awesome! His book The Whipping Boy got a well-deserved Newbery medal.