The Middle Kid Selected Stories

Middle-class, middle child, way uncool hair _ these are the true confessions of an aspiring outcast and lackluster altar boy at the crossroads of Hell and junior high. In this riotous memoir, Brandon Christopher reflects on life as an unusually tall, mischief-obsessed altar boy at a private school in Los Angeles. Set in the quirky mid-1980s, The Middle Kid skillfully weaves together the end of ChristopherÕs childhood and the beginning of his journey toward manhood, as told through cringe-worthy yet hilarious stories from the authorÕs irreverent and unabashedly honest perspective.

A story about the wonderfully challenging realities of being a family's middle kid. Readers experience a day in the life of a middle kid, and all the highs and lows of a life in-between. When you're the middle kid, you're never the first nor the last to do anything. You're not the tallest or the smallest; you're babysitting one sibling but teased by the other. Stuck between a bossy older brother and a naive younger sister, Middle Kid feels left out of two worlds. But even if—and maybe especially because—it's always overlooked, this kid's own world is just as big and important as his siblings'. • From author-illustrator Steven Weinberg—a middle kid himself! • Gently funny and richly detailed • Starting in the morning and ending at night, readers experience a full day in Middle Kid's shoes Middle children have classically been sandwiched between the achievements of the older sibling and the needs of the younger one—The Middle Kid gives them a time to shine! • Perfect for beginning readers • A great empathy read • Fans of comical books about family

The first-born might feel pushed aside when a sibling is born. But being oldest has its perks. The youngest child may feel left out of activities. But everyone loves the baby in the family. Being the middle child is unique and comes with experiences only a middle child knows.

Balancing wisdom and innocence, joy and foreboding, Sheila Heti’s completely original stories lead you to surprising places. This edition featuring nine new stories. A frog doles out sage advice to a plumber infatuated with a princess, a boy falls hopelessly in love with a monkey, and a man with a hat keeps apocalyptic thoughts at bay by resolving to follow a plan that he admits he won’t stick to. Globe and Mail critic Russell Smith has described Heti’s stories as cryptic fairy tales without morals at the end, but really the morals are in the quality of the telling and in the details disclosed along the way. Look where you weren’t going to look, think what you wouldn't have thought, Heti seems to say, and meaning itself gains more meaning, more dimensions. Heti’s stories are not what you expect, but why did you expect that anyway? This special new edition features nine new stories that were not available in the first Canadian edition.

A clever, bluesy riff on middle-kid angst Lee has the low-down, big-frown, sulkin?-all-aroundtown blues. His older brother gets all the big-kid privileges, and no one expects his little sister to do anything but be cute. And sometimes his family even leaves him behind! But when Lee breaks out his guitar and finally makes his voice be heard, he draws a big crowd. It turns out lots and lots of people share his middle-kid pain'and he loves how being stuck in the middle is making him the center of attention.

Winner of the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize, shortlisted for the CLA Book of the Year for Children Award and the Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award, and selected as an OLA Best Bet for 2012 At first Curtis isn't that worried when his mother doesn't come home from her all-night job at the local gas bar. She'll be back, he's ten out of ten positive. After all, she promised she would never leave him again. Besides, Curtis is used to looking after himself and his five-year-old brother, Artie, and for a time he manages things on his own, keeping their mother's absence a secret. He knows exactly what will happen if any of the teachers find out the truth. He remembers his last horrible foster home all too clearly. Curtis gets pretty good at forging his mother's signature, but when the credit card maxes out and the landlord starts pressuring for the rent, it's more than a twelve-year-old can handle. Just in time, Curtis and Artie make friends with Mrs. Burt, the cranky, lonely old lady who lives across the street. And when the authorities start to investigate, the boys agree to go with Mrs. Burt to her remote cabin by the lake, and the three of them abscond in her 1957 Chevy Bel Air. At the lake, the boys' days are filled with wood-chopping, outhouse-building, fishing, swimming and Mrs. Burt's wonderful cooking. But as the summer sails by, Curtis can't stop thinking about his mother's promise. Then the weather grows colder, and Mrs. Burt seems to be preparing to spend the winter at the cabin, and Curtis starts to worry. Have they really all just absconded to the lake for a summer holiday? Or have the two boys been kidnapped? Set in Vancouver and the B.C. wilderness (the trip to the cabin involves a hilarious white-knuckled road trip through Hope), this is a book that reflects Caroline Adderson's many writerly strengths -- her "wit and a facility for dialogue, good pacing and a brisk, clean prose style" (Globe and Mail), her "close observation of telling details" (Quill & Quire) and her ability to "celebrate a child’s imagination in a realistically humorous way" (Canadian Materials).

catawampus: /kat-uh-wom-puh s/: Adj. 1: crooked; out of alignment 2: askew; awry No single word describes this collection of short stories better than the title itself: Catawampus. Told with Brandon Christopher's wry wit, unflinching humor and imaginative style, each story gives us a brief and sudden glimpse into the stranger side of ordinary lives. They beckon us to pull back the veneer of normalcy to dive headfirst into the odd, the eccentric, the heartbreaking, and the hilarious. From funeral crashers and Roman philosophers to feuding landlords and peculiar tea parties, Catawampus is a refreshing and strikingly original fiction collection.

My life as a ten year old middle child in my family.