David Lubar’s Teeny Weenies, The Intergalactic Petting Zoo and Other Stories is a set of very short twisty tales for 7 year olds, each one built around its last line.<\/p>\n
The title story starts with a family who stop at roadside attractions. Dad loves them. They have done the plumbing museum, ten rooms of taps and plungers. They have done two hours of a natural fibre museum with a tank of hardworking silkworms. So when a billboard promises Zorg’s Intergalactic Petting Zoo, off they go.<\/p>\n
Inside there are blue lambs with a second set of ears, a pig with tattoos, a calf wearing antlers. All obviously faked up, and the boy telling it says so. Then they walk through a door labelled Sol III hominids, the floor lurches, and something with trunks for arms reaches down to rub his back.<\/p>\n
That is the shape of all of them. An ordinary afternoon, a step sideways, then a line that either makes you laugh out loud or makes your stomach drop.<\/p>\n
A boy who waves his arms and drawls “root, root, root” at his sister’s softball game grows actual roots and cannot get up. A grandfather explains, with sound effects, how the town swimming pool once filled solid with bullies doing cannonballs, what their parents fed them to stop the crying and what happened when somebody lit a sparkler. Two cheerful mad scientists aim an invisibility ray at their niece and invent visibility instead.<\/p>\n
They are funny and they are properly short. If your reader is at the stage of wanting to finish a whole story in one sitting, or of wanting to read one out loud at the table, these are made for it. The word Weenie does a lot of work as the running joke, and it lands on anyone who takes something far too seriously, adults very much included.<\/p>\n
A heads-up on one story. In Collect Them All a boy cheats to win the last of a set of action figures. The figure arrives, it smiles at him, it raises a weapon and fires, and he simply stops existing. The other figures raise their weapons too and the invasion begins. That is the whole ending. Nothing softens it, nobody rescues him, and one or two of the others finish badly as well.<\/p>\n
Plenty of children this age find that deliciously creepy and immediately want to read it to somebody. A child who needs the good characters to be all right at the end will not enjoy those pages at all.<\/p>\n
Freestyle Frenzy is the companion collection, with suspiciously fast swimmers at a school gala and a fishing trip that catches something it really should not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
David Lubar’s Teeny Weenies, The Intergalactic Petting Zoo and Other Stories is a set of very short twisty tales for 7 year olds, each one built around its last line. The title story starts with a family who stop at roadside attractions. Dad loves them. They have done the plumbing museum, ten rooms of taps […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11414,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":8783,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Freestyle Frenzy","lr_seo_hook":"Very short stories that turn on their last line, some of them mean."},"book_tag":[23],"age_group":[19],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[242],"class_list":["post-8784","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-funny-books","age_group-books-for-7-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-david-lubar"],"yoast_title":"Teeny Weenies – The Intergalactic Petting Zoo and Other Stories by David Lubar | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Very short stories that turn on their last line, some of them mean. For ages 7+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n