Books like Wayside School Boxed Set

Louis Sachar doesn't do voices. He doesn't sing, either – not unless you count the “dramatic reading” stylings of William Shatner as singing (when incanting “Wayside School is Falling Down,” for instance, or performing one character's “Missing Sock” song).This makes the audio book compilation of Sachar's three Wayside School books (Sideways Stories from Wayside School, Wayside School is Falling Down, and Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger) that much easier to listen to, because Sachar himself does the reading. In other words, there's nothing "sing-songy" or vocally irritating to get stuck in a listener's head to distract from the actual stories themselves.Wayside School is, indeed, the most unusual – and most creative – take on the familiar theme to have seen print in a long time. As it was conceptualized, the thirty-storey Wayside School building (with one classroom on each floor – instead of one storey with thirty classrooms on it, which was the result of some contractor's astonishing oversight) was not a politically-correct establishment. Kids call each other nasty names - “Fatso,” for example – but not to be cruel. Sometimes, something terrible happens – like a child's dog will get hit by a car. Or someone shows up to class with a gun (not a student, admittedly, but one character does appear at Wayside with a loaded firearm). Or a stranger will make menacing comments to a sole female student, all alone in her classroom. Or a trouble-making kid will get kicked over a fence by an adult.But nothing truly terrible ever really happens. Not at Wayside. But you know, as “threatening” as these incidents sound, there's never any real feeling of meanness or terror involved in any of it. It's just accepted as a part of the unsanitized life in which all children live, whether we like to admit it or not. These things are all treated as slapstick – not true-to-life tragedies. It's an escape, healthy yet unpasteurized. Sometimes, at least for an adult readership, some of the endings feel a little contrived – even predictable But it isn't so much how a story is going to end, per se, but the means by which the story arrives there. A reader legitimately cares about the story, even if the ending seems clear early on. The means b y which that ending is attained is so off-the-wall as to be completely devoid of predictability. The one thing missing from the audiobook, of course, are the delightful illustrations by Julie Brinckloe and Adam McCauley which appear in the print editions of these books. Without the illustrations, much of the books' charm is lost. Regardless of the limitations of the format, however, Sachar's reading provides all the warmth and humour of his own material, and one cannot imagine it being given a better treatment.