Hobie Hanson, You're Weird - Hardcover

Gilson, Jamie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068806700X ISBN 13: 9780688067007

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1987

Synopsis

With his best friend away at computer camp, Hobie reluctantly shares adventures with a girl classmate the summer after fourth grade

About this title

About the Author

Jamie Gilson has written sixteen books, all of them about children, most of them about children in school. And the elementary school where she gets many of her ideas is Central, which all three Gilson children attended. While Tom and Anne are now lawyers and Matthew a photographer, their mother still goes to Central School classes, notebook in hand, looking for stories.

She describes Central's cafeteria in Do Bananas Chew Gum?, its Spit Pit in Thirteen Ways to Sink a Sub, and the contents of some of its fourth grade desks in Hobie Hanson, You're Weird. Central students have taught her how to sing "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells," how to chew a mint so it sparks in the dark, and how to play soccer on a field of mud.

She spent two weeks with the whole fifth grade class while, in a kind of total immersion, they studied the Western Movement. On the first day the boys and girls found out who they'd be married to for those two weeks. Then they took pioneer identities, joined a wagon train, chose supplies, decided whether to cross a rushing river at midnight, made pumpkin butter, dipped candles, and built mock fires with fake buffalo chips. They had a wonderful time--mostly. Jamie wrote a book about it: Wagon Train 911.

"It's true, though," she says, "that while Central is very special to me, every school is brimming with rich stories. I talk with children all over the country about my writing, and the one question they always ask is, 'Witt you put us in a book?' If I were there tong enough, I expect I could."

Jamie Gilson's professional life has always involved writing and communications. Formerly a teacher of junior high school speech and English, she was a staff writer and producer for Chicago Board of Education radio station WBEZ, a writer of Encyclopaedia Brittanica films, and continuity director for fine arts radio station WFMT. She was, for ten years, a monthly columnist for Chicago magazine.

Born in Beardstown, Illinois, Jamie Gilson spent her early years in small towns in Illinois and Missouri where her father worked as a flour miller. After graduating from Northwestern University School of Speech, she married Jerome Gilson, then a law student and now a trademark lawyer. They live within sight and sound of Lake Michigan in a suburb of Chicago.

Reviews

Grade 3-5 Hobie Hanson returns in a third set of escapades following 13 Ways to Sink a Sub (1982) and 4B Goes Wild (1983, both Lothrop). As 4B finishes the school year, Hobie faces a dull summer without his sidekick Nick, who's off to computer camp. The last person he expects to liven things up is bossy Molly, but when she hangs around him at the 4th of July parade and adds her own brand of ``weird,'' an unexpected alliance forms. What loomed ahead as a boring summer begins to sparkle with fireworks, genuine and otherwise, as Molly and Hobie win a pie-eating contest, participate in burying the town's time capsule, make the front page of the local paper, and stage a comeuppance for some snobbish girls. With dialogue right on target for the age, Gilson writes with humor and appeal for kids as Hobie continues the fun of the previous books. Julie Cummins, Monroe County Library System, Rochester, N.Y.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 068806700X
• ISBN 13: 9780688067007
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Primavera Elise
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 172