Guys Read: Other Worlds

Other Worlds, a Guys Read collection put together by Jon Scieszka, is a book of fantasy and sci-fi stories for 11 year olds from some seriously big-name writers.

What happens

It's the fourth Guys Read book, with ten stories in all, each by a different author. Rick Riordan, Shannon Hale, Rebecca Stead, Kenneth Oppel, Shaun Tan and Ray Bradbury are among them. So it's a great way to try out a writer before committing to a whole novel.

It opens with a Percy Jackson adventure, and what an opening. Percy is hanging from a billboard over Times Square, about to fall, and he's lost his trousers. How did he get there? You can blame Apollo.

It's Grover's birthday, and the god turns up with a problem. One of his golden backup singers has gone rogue and run off to become a Broadway star. The trouble is her voice. One note can make a whole crowd weep, dance or drop from the heat. So Percy and Grover have to catch her, armed with some ear wax and Apollo's own lyre. Grover isn't very good at the lyre yet (he manages bricks, a chicken and a plate of enchiladas).

It's fast and very funny, and Percy's jokey narration is all there. If your reader already knows Percy, they'll feel right at home.

Then Shannon Hale takes you somewhere completely different. Spark has run away from home in her big brother's armour and hasn't eaten for three days. So when a tavern needs a new bouncer, she claims to be a fearsome mage from Old Hollow. All she really has is a shiny black rock, a lot of nerve and years of bossing nine younger brothers and sisters about! Watching her bluff her way through is a joy.

That mix is the fun of it. One story might be a laugh and the next an adventure with real stakes. If one isn't quite your reader's thing, the next will be something else entirely.

There's some peril along the way. The tavern's last bouncer ended up dead in a ditch, raiders are burning villages, and Spark slips a sleepy herb into a customer's stew. It's adventure-story stuff rather than anything upsetting.

What to read next

If the Percy story is the one they love, go back to where it all started with The Lightning Thief. Percy is twelve and at a boarding school for troubled kids, and his best friend Grover is hiding a rather big secret.