I Funny: A Middle School Story

James Patterson and Chris Grabenstein's I Funny: A Middle School Story is a comedy for 9 year olds about a boy in a wheelchair who wants to be the funniest kid on the planet.

What happens

Jamie Grimm tells jokes the way other people breathe. He's read every joke book he can find and filled dozens of notebooks with his own. At his Uncle Frankie's diner he tells a joke to every customer he serves, and he can make almost anyone laugh.

Almost. Jamie has just moved to Long Beach, near New York, to live with his aunt's family. He calls them the Smileys, because they never smile. His cousin Stevie Kosgrov, now officially his adoptive brother, is the school's champion bully. Jamie's bedroom is their old garage.

Uncle Frankie thinks Jamie should enter the Planet's Funniest Kid Comic Contest. Jamie's sure he'd choke. (He does choke, halfway through a class speech about climbing Everest.) The book opens with him under the spotlight, sweating, his first joke gone clean out of his head. How he ends up there is the story.

Jamie tells it straight to you, and it's crammed with one-liners. Some are his own and some belong to famous comedians, and he usually tells you which. You'll probably find yourself reading a few out loud!

Underneath the gags there's real sadness. Jamie keeps hinting that something happened back in his old town and that he isn't ready to talk about it. You can feel how lonely he is.

It's worth knowing that the bullying is fairly rough. Stevie knocks Jamie out of his chair, locks him out in the cold, and gets his mates to throw him off the boardwalk onto the sand. He calls him "crip" too. Jamie hates it and the book is firmly on his side, but you might want to be ready for a chat about it.

If your reader loves jokes, underdogs and friends who stick by you, they'll fly through this. Jamie's mates Pierce and Gaynor are brilliant, and so is Gilda, the girl with the bubbly laugh.

What to read next

For more from the same two writers, The Genius Experiment stars Max Einstein, a twelve-year-old New Yorker with a head full of big ideas and nowhere proper to live.