Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger

Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger by Louis Sachar

This a bunch of short stories that tie together the experiences at Wayside School. The school is bizarre and many strange things just happen without people being concerned. The school has ben built up instead of across, requiring kids to use stairs to get to classes. Elevators are finally installed, but to limit conflict, one will only be used for going up and the other only for going down. These elevators are thus used once, and never again. There is a substitute that is really nice, only somebody reports that she was cruel a long time back and is still after old homework. A teacher also goes after a cruel dentist for old homework and chases her out of town. There are plenty of other bizarre and humorous tales in the book.

Sideways Stories from Wayside School

Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar

Wayside school was accidentally built "sideways", with 30 classrooms on 30 different floors. The stories in this book center on the classroom on the 30th floor. It is in the "just a little bit beyond normal" vein. In one story teacher turns kids she doesn't like into apples. However, they manage to get her to turn them back to kids and when she tries to turn them into apples again, they hold up a mirror. She becomes an apple. Later another school worker comes in and eats the apple. In another story, a kid races up and down from the 30th story to serve as the go-between for a simple conversation. There is a kid that comes in with a smelly rain coat. They make him take it off to see another, and keep doing that until they find it is just a dead rat - and dead rats are always sneaking into the classroom. In one, kids stereotype other kids by their names, even if the behaviour. There is plenty of "fun" in this book, but it does get a bit over the top.

Small Steps

Small Steps by Louis Sachar

Small Steps is a spin off of Holes. X-Ray and Armpit are home to Austin from Camp Green Lake. One hatches a plan for a ticket scalping operation from a big concert. However, one decides to take a girl with cerebral palsy there. The other guy ended up copying the tickets and selling them. They were nearly arrested when someone was in the seats. However, the girl had a seizure and it all ended up good as they meet the pop star. However, they do get called in as part of the police investigation of the source of the fake tickets.

Things get really out of hand. The pop star likes the boy and even invites him out to San Francisco to see her. They have a bit of a falling out. However, when he goes to apologize to her, he finds some people are attempting to kill her and frame him. He manages to do just enough to save her life and becomes a hero. He returns home to a newfound popularity. The cops also agree to drop the scalping investigation. (They have identified them - but they have sympathy for what he has gone through.)

The book is a bit sappy with some over-the-top situations just a little bit outside the realm of normal. 

Someday Angeline

Someday Angeline by Louis Sachar

Angeline is crazy smart. However, her emotional maturity is lacking. Despite being 8, she is prone to suck her thumb and cry. Her mother died when she was an infant and she is raised by her garbage-truck driving father. At school, she gets put in the 6th grade. However, the teacher is an idiot and doesn't like the kid being smarter than her.

She doesn't have any friends until she meets a 5th grade loner who likes to tell jokes. She loves his jokes and the two become friends. She also hangs out with him in Miss Turbone's class. (They often hear her name as "Mr. Bone" ) They take care of the fish and go to the aquarium. After some struggles, Angeline skips school to hang out with fish. One day she goes to the ocean. She chats with a half-drunk man fishing at the pier. Then she goes further and accidentally falls in. the man saves her, but she is only able to recover at the hospital after he hears jokes. Her father then dates Miss Turbone. The book is nice and sappy. There is a bit of "magic" with her intelligence, yet it is easy to relate to some of the struggles that smarter kids have, especially when their emotional level is behind their intelligence.

Wayside School Is Falling Down

Wayside School Is Falling Down by Louis Sachar, illustrated by Joel Schick

Wayside school is a little bit different. The building is a high rise, with rooms up on the 20th story, but no 19th story. Only there is a 19th story, but once people go there, they never leave. (Though they may spend time memorizing the dictionary or writing all numbers from 1 to a million in alphabetical order.)

The book starts with a school worker pretending to be a teacher to take delivery of a fragile box. He climbs up all the stairs to deliver to the teacher. The teacher has him hold it while she conducts a spelling be to see who can help him. He struggles with it, but eventually the teacher looks. She determines it is a computer. She then uses it for the lesson on gravity - by dropping it out the window.

There is a boy who gets known by the wrong name, but never bothers to correct people. There is a sub who gets everyone to learn by playing along with their teasing (which came off the boy trying to come clean with his name, and everyone copying him.) There are plenty of other weird things that happen. There are bits and pieces of plot, but most is just enough glue to hold together random humorous stories.

Holes

Holes could almost be considered magical realism, except it doesn't really have much "magic" in it, other than "curses". The characters are believable, yet caricatured. Stanley Yelnats IV is the fourth in the line of the cursed Stanleys. It all comes from a great grandfather who failed to come back to take the pig and the old lady up the hill the final day. This resulted in him not getting the "airhead" daughter as a bridge and set about the curse on his family. They occasionally do have good things happen, but even those are met by tragedy. Stanley had sneakers fall on his head, was accused of stealing them and then sent off to a prison work camp. He makes friends with one of the boys, teaches him to read, and eventually expose some bad characters and lift the curse.
The backstory also relates Stanley to the land of his prison. His ancestor was robbed there. An old schoolteacher was victimized by racist townspeople and became a great bandit. Onions can also save lives.
The style works really well. The plot moves quickly, and the story has just the right amount of quirkiness.

Fuzzy Mud

Fuzzy Mud intersperses the story of a few kids with that of senate hearings about a renewable "biolene" fuel. At first it is unclear how they two are related. However, the stories gradually converge. A girl and a boy always walk home together. The boy is usually picked on by a bully. One day they try to walk through the woods in hopes of avoiding the bully. However, the bully is there, and they attempt to attack him by throwing some fuzzy mud. This ends up causing quite the situation. The "mud" attacks the body and creates a significant rash. The girl tries to fight the rash, but it continues to grow. She is later scared when the bully does not return to school. She cares for him as a person, even after all the problems he has caused. She tries to help him get medical attention - even sacrificing her perfect attendance. Her moves did more than that, possibly even saving the human race from a great catastrophe. In the process, the kids grow and begin to understand each other better. We also get a cautionary tale of the dangers of bioengineering. The fuzzy mud was caused from a "miracle" fuel source. However, mutations can happen that can cause it to grow out of hand and became something harmful to humans. They were lucky that it was discovered before it spread to areas that would not contain it. What would have happen if it was not contained and was able to spread and mutate freely?