Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Take a Second Look: Booktalk 2



[Hold up cover.] This is Loeb. He’s a middle-school zombie. Just like the title tells you, he eats brains for lunch, as the other zombies at his school do. The zombies have flies, maggots, and when they roll their eyes, their eyes fall out of their heads. So Loeb’s got quite a middle school – there are three groups of kids. You’ve got the zombies, the Lifers [regular human beings], and the chupacabras [blood suckers, also called Chupos]. Weird, huh? Well, this is one weird book. It is written entirely in haiku form. Why in haiku? I mean, there’s nothing creepy about haikus! Loeb the zombie likes to hang out in the school library. The librarian, Mrs. Fincher, recognizes that he’s really smart and a good writer. She urges him to enter his haikus at open poetry mike night at school. Oh, and to complicate things, he sort of has a crush on a pretty lifer named Siobhan. Loeb’s friends sure don’t want him to succeed: after all, there are unwritten rules about what zombies can and cannot do. But Loeb is kind of cool, and smart, and funny. So what if his ear falls off from time to time?

Brains for Lunch by K. A. Holt. 86 p. Roaring Book Press, 2010. Booktalk to 5th, middle school, high school.

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