Sideways Stories from Wayside School

By Louis Sachar, Tim Heitz (illustrator),

Book cover of Sideways Stories from Wayside School

Book description

There has been a terrible mistake. Instead of having thirty classrooms side by side, Wayside School is thirty storeys high! (The builder said he was sorry.) Perhaps that's why all sorts of strange and unusual things keep happening - especially in Mrs Jewls's classroom on the very top floor.

There's…

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Why read it?

4 authors picked Sideways Stories from Wayside School as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

What can I say? It’s the goated friendly freaks book.

This collection of super short connected stories stars one kid per tale. The kids are weird and wild, and something that has really stuck with me my whole life is that some of the kids are rotten and stay rotten. Not everyone needs to grow and change in 120 pages.

Let a character stink. Let a kid be a wet rat. Let a nasty teacher be eaten. Anyway, there’s this incredible way that the author employs a third-person limited POV that gets me every time, even on the hundredth…

This is a humorous collection of thirty related short stories that intertwine and connect to tell a story of a group of kids and teachers from Wayside School, which was built sideways. All the stories are a bit strange and silly. I love the distinct personality traits of each character and the direct, objective writing style which adds comicality as well as wit to the overall voice and tone of the book.

A series of standalone, but connected stories centered around the strangest elementary school you’re likely to ever see. Louis Sachar is one of my all-time favorite kid writers and I recommend all of work (his Newberry Winning “Holes” is one of my top five favorite books of all time). Wayside School was accidentally built sideways so it stands 30 stories high. Lots of strange things happen at the school, especially on the 13th floor where Mrs. Gorf may be the meanest teacher of all time. There are three more books in this series, and they are all hysterical, but…

From Allan's list on will make you laugh.

I read this book (and the others in the series) so many times when I was growing up. It was probably my first introduction to absurdist humor, and I fell in love. The book tells the story of Wayside School, which was supposed to be a one-story building with thirty classrooms but was instead built as a thirty-story building with one classroom on each level (except the 19th floor, which does not exist). The whole book is a love letter to absurdity, with teachers that turn children into apples, kids that get stuck to their chairs with chewing gum,…

From Kyle's list on for goofy kids.

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