Jack Gantos Books In Order

Rotten Ralph

In desperation, Sarah sends Rotten Ralph to feline finishing school. Will Ralph’s mischief finally be a thing of the past?

Worse Than Rotten Ralph

Rotten Ralph makes an earnest attempt at good behavior but is enticed, not too reluctantly, into a series of misadventures by some ruffian alley cats.

Rotten Ralph’s Trick Or Treat

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. When Sarah takes Ralph to a Halloween party, Ralph pours goldfish into the punch bowl and takes the lid off the popcorn popper. Then the hostess asks them to leave, but Sarah forgives Ralph for his naughtiness, saying ”Oh Ralph, you’re still my best frie

Happy Birthday, Rotten Ralph

Believe it or not, Rotten Ralph turns 25 this spring. During that quarter century, he has entertained many young children with his shenanigans, which are more often than not rather naughty. Young readers and listeners will delight in helping Ralph celebrate his birthday in this all new recording of Happy Birthday, Rotten Ralph, read by author Jack Gantos, who brings Ralph to life with this lively reading. This resealable package comes with a paperback and a two sided cassette tape. The audio production includes lively sound effects and original music. Side one includes page turn signals; side two features an uninterrupted reading.

Not So Rotten Ralph

In desperation, Sarah sends Rotten Ralph to feline finishing school. Will Ralph’s mischief finally be a thing of the past? This package comes with a paperback and a two sided cassette tape. The professionally narrated audio production includes lively sound effects and original music. Side one includes page turn signals; side two features an uninterrupted reading.

Rotten Ralph’s Halloween Howl

‘Nothing can scare me!’ shouts Ralph not even a creaky, old haunted house on Halloween. Ralph wanders through the monster mansion and unbolts Frankenstien’s head, grosses out a ghoul, and drinks a vampire’s mug o’blood. But the fright fest isn’t over just yet…
Ralph’s friend Sarah has saved the best spine tingler for last. Peel back the flaps in this spooktacular gatefold book to see all of Rotten Ralph’s hilarious Halloween tricks!

Wedding Bells for Rotten Ralph

Ralph outdoes himself again in this picture book of wedding bliss and bedlam. It’s Aunt Martha’s wedding day and Sarah is the flower girl, but Ralph is determined to turn this celebration into an event only our favorite rotten cat could enjoy. He begins by wrapping the wedding gift with that special Ralph flair, then selecting some choice ‘petals’ for Sarah to spread over the guests. After a riotous ceremony, he tops the day by wreaking havoc at the reception.’Oh, Ralph you were so rotten,’ bemoans Sarah. Is there anything that cat will do to make her happy? You’ll be surprised…
”I bet I know who did that”, Sarah said to herself. She peeked under the table and saw Ralph eating a monster slice of cake. Sarah’s the flower girl at Aunt Martha’s wedding, and Ralph is ready to tie all kinds of knots but are they the kind that will make for marital bliss? If they involve a red cat, a monster truck, and paws full of snails, you can guess the answer. The question to be popped is: After a day of nuptial sabotage, can Ralph still make Sarah smile? Once again, Jack Gantos and Nicole Rubel manage to bring equal measures of love and nastiness to Sarah’s special cat. 00 Children’s Choices IRA/CBC

Back to School for Rotten Ralph

The character Rotten Ralph was created more than twenty years ago. Now the worlds most rotten cat and his friend, Sarah, set out again on a variety of capricious capers. In three brand new boisterously entertaining stories, Rotten Ralph is sure to weasel his way into the hearts of another generation of readers. In Back to School for Rotten Ralph, summer is over, and Sarah cant wait to start school and make some new friendsother than her rotten cat, Ralph. But Ralph wants to be Sarahs only friend, and he won’t be left behind. When Sarah boards the school bus, he disguises himself as a student, follows her to class, and starts his scheme of sabotage. Ralphs plan works brilliantly until his true identity is revealed and the entire class wants to be friends with Sarah and Ralph!

The Christmas Spirit Strikes Rotten Ralph

Santa Claus is coming to town and Rotten Ralph is determined to make a purr fect impression. Can the world’s naughtiest cat be nice for Christmas. Pull back the flaps to see Rotten Ralph’s hilarious Christmas catastrophes as he and Sarah deck the halls

Rotten Ralph’s Rotten Romance

Sarah wakes Ralph up with a great big kiss. Happy Valentine’s Day! she says. Rotten Ralph hides under his pillow. Sarah is very excited to take Ralph to Petunia s Valentine s Day Party. But Ralph will do almost anything to avoid the party and drippy Valentine kisses!

Rotten Ralph Helps Out

‘Rotten Ralph is one cat who can make reading fun for kids. And he does!’ Marc BrownSarah needs a topic for her school project on ancient Egypt. Her rotten red cat, Ralph, thinks history is a bore. Only after he spoils a research trip to the library does Ralph decide to help. According to Sarah, the ancient Egyptians believed cats were wise and had special powers. And Rotten Ralph knows he can prove them right!This antic adventure is the first Rotten Ralph Rotten Reader, a rambunctious new series for beginning readers.

Rotten Ralph’s Rotten Christmas

Rotten Ralph is not at all nice to the Christmas visitor.

Rotten Ralph’s Show and Tell

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Sarah takes her rotten cat Ralph to school for Show and Tell and he behaves terribly, as usual, by spoiling everyone’s show.

Rotten Ralph’s Thanksgiving Wish

This Thanksgiving, Sarah’s cat, Ralph, has something extra to be thankful for: his cat cousin Percy is cooking the big turkey with Ralph as junior chef. Will dinner ever be served?Pull back the flaps to see each of Ralph’s deliciously rotten Thanksgiving pranks!

Practice Makes Perfect for Rotten Ralph

It’s carnival time for Ralph, Sarah, and Percy, Ralph s cousin! Ralph is ready to play games and win prizes. But perfect Percy has been practicing. He keeps beating Ralph and wooing Sarah with his winnings. Fed up with losing, Ralph decides to cheat his way to victory…
until Sarah puts a stop to it. School Library Journal hails Rotten Ralph Helps Out, the first Rotten Ralph Rotten Reader, as a wise choice for youngsters making the transition from picture books to chapter books. In this feisty new adventure, the world s favorite come back cat shows Percy and Sarah that all his practice at losing can make him a winner in the end.

Rotten Ralph Feels Rotten

Rotten to the core!When Sarah serves up a healthy, home cooked meal chock full of fruits and vegetables, Rotten Ralph turns up his nose and refuses to eat. With those overflowing, back alley trash cans in mind, he has more exciting dinner plans on his menu. Garbage for dinner? Uh oh! Rotten Ralph’s bad eating habits are about to make him feel rotten for real. In this latest installment in the popular Rotten Readers, Gantos and Rubel team up to capture their feline hero as he’s feeling his worst and making us laugh at the same time.

Best in Show for Rotten Ralph

To thine own self be true. The cat show is coming to town and Rotten Ralph is hungry for glory and desperate to defeat his perfect cousin Percy, whatever it takes. According to Sarah, Ralph has to stop being a lazy scoundrel and follow her regimen to achieve poise and polish. When the competition gets under way, Ralph pretends to be something he’s not, and fails. Just in time, Ralph decides victory can be his only if he stops pretending and really lets the fur fly. With eye popping art and an ingeniously comic text, this fourth book in the appealing series for beginning readers follows everyone s favorite red furred rascal on his path to a wholly satisfying last laugh

The Nine Lives of Rotten Ralph

Poor Rotten Ralph. His health just isn t what it used to be. Thanks to his rotten ways, he’s down to the very last of his nine lives! One more slip and he ll be gone forever, warns the vet. Sarah, Ralph s doting owner, is fiercely determined to keep her cat safe. But how much coddling can Ralph take before he has to do something totally and utterly rotten? In this ninth tale about the most delightfully disobedient cat in town, being naughty has never looked so good to Rotten Ralph. But then again, after a hard day s rotten work, neither does the warmth and safety of Sarah s lap!

Three Strikes for Rotten Ralph

Before he tries out for the new Fighting Squirrels baseball team, Rotten Ralph is sure he is going to be a superstar. Never mind that he doesn’t have any skills and doesn’t want to practice. While his owner, Sarah, is doing everything she can to make the team, she tries to help Ralph do his best, too. But with his imagination running wild, Ralph’s worst is what comes out.

Jack Adrift

He’s really at sea this timeAs the Henry family sets sail for a new life on Cape Hatteras, fourth grader Jack is struggling to chart a course between his parents contradictory advice on making friends and influencing people. Just tell people what they want to hear, Dad advises. Just tell the truth, Mom cautions. Jack finds there are no easy answers as he drifts through his crazy school year, falling desperately in love with his young teacher, getting suckered into becoming a bad behavior spy for the principal, and being forced to make a presentable pet out of a duck with backward feet. Indeed, with an airheaded, air guitar playing neighbor the closest thing to a friend, and a judgmental older sister his relentless enemy, it s all he can do to stay afloat. This colorful and comic new collection of interrelated stories featuring the author s hapless alter ego is a prequel to the other four books in the Jack Henry series, praised by Booklist for their hilarious, exquisitely painful, and utterly on target depiction of the life of an adolescent and preadolescent boy. Jack Adrift: Fourth Grade Without a Clue is a 2004 Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year.

Heads Or Tails

From the Newbery Medal winning author of Dead End in Norvelt, eight more hysterical semi autobiographical Jack Henry stories about a sixth grader’s trials and tribulationsJack s life is a crazy roller coaster ride. At his fifth school in six years, he has a crackpot teacher who won t give him a break about his lousy handwriting and a secret crush who wants to be a policewoman. At home, he has a pesky little brother with a knack for getting hurt whenever Jack s supposed to be looking after him, a terror for an older sister, all sorts of weird neighbors, and, last but not least, ferocious alligators in the canal behind his house. Writing in his diary about his good days and bad days is one way Jack survives his up and down year. But he s also a kid who knows that life can go any which way at any given moment. He might as well flip a coin: heads he wins, tails he loses. What will turn up next?

Jack’s New Power

Jack Henry, the hero of Heads or Tails: Stories from Sixth Grade, is back. It is the summer after sixth grade and Jack and his offbeat family have relocated to Barbados. But even in a tropical paradise, Jack is plagued by misadventure. He gets a violent case of blood poisoning after chasing a headless chicken, discovers the perils of male bonding in a pepper eating contest with his father, and has his heartstrings twanged by an older woman his sister’s best friend to name just a few of his trials and tribulations in these eight fierce and funny stories.

Jack’s Black Book

A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age.

Jack Gantos explores Jack Henry’s disastrously hilarious adventures in fifth grade in Jack on the Tracks, newly available this season.

Jack On the Tracks

A prequel to Heads or Tails: Stories from the Sixth GradeInspired by the author’s childhood diaries, this new collection of Jack Henry stories depicts a fifth grade year to end all fifth grade years. Living in a Miami rental home with a busy railroad track running a stone’s throw from the backyard, the author’s alter ego is plagued by a know it all older sister, a bizarre Francophile teacher, a series of crazed cats, a slightly off kilter father, a tapeworm, and a pair of escaped convicts to name just a few of his antagonists. But for Jack Henry, hailed by School Library Journal as ‘an ‘everyboy’ whose world may be wacko but whose heart and spirit are eminently sane,’ no matter how rough the ride, there is always light at the end of the tunnel.

Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key

Joey Pigza can’t sit still. He can’t pay attention, he can’t follow the rules, and he can’t help it especially when his meds aren’t working. Joey’s had problems ever since he was born, problems just like his dad and grandma have. And whether he’s wreaking havoc on a class trip or swallowing his house key, Joey’s problems are getting worse. In fact, his behavior is so off the wall that his teachers are threatening to send him to the special ed center downtown. Joey knows he’s really a good kid, but no matter how hard he tries to do the right thing, something always seems to go wrong. Will he ever get anything right?00 01 Sunshine State Young Reader’s Award Masterlist Gr. 3 5, 00 01 Sunshine State Young Reader’s Award Masterlist Gr. 6 8, 2000 2001 Georgia’s Picture Storybook Award & Georgia’s Children’s Book Award Masterlist, 01 AZ Young Reader Award Masterlist Teen Bks cat., 00 01 Minnesota’s Maud Hart Lovelace Book Award Masterlist, 00 01 Land of Enchantment Book Award Masterlist Gr. 3 6, 00 01 Young Reader’s Choice Award Program Masterlist, Pacific NW Library Assoc. 2001 Young Reader’s Choice Award Masterlist, and 00 01 Lone Star Reading List

Joey Pigza Loses Control

approx. 3 hours, 2 cassettesSequel to Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, National Book Award finalistWhen Joey Pigza meets his dad for the first time in years, he meets a grown up version of his old out of control self. Carter Pigza is as wired as Joey used to be before his stint in special ed, and before he got his new meds. Joey’s mom reluctantly agrees that he can stay with his dad for a summer visit, which sends Joey racing with sky high hpes that he and Carter can finally get to know each other. But as the weeks whirl by, Carter has bigger plans in mind: He decides that just as he has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, Joey can do the same and become as normal as any kid, without the help of a doctor’s prescription. Carter believes Joey can do it, and Joey wants to believe him more than anything in the world. Here is the continuation of the acclaimed Joey Pigza story, affirming not only that Joey Pigza is a true original but that it runs in the family.

What Would Joey Do?

Sequel to Joey Pigza Loses Control, a Newbery Honor BookAre they flirting or fighting? This is Joey Pigza’s question when the fireworks suddenly start to explode between his long separated mom and dad, whom he’s never really had a chance to see together. The more out of control his parents get, the less in control Joey feels and the more he wants to help make things better. But Joey’s ailing tell it like it is grandmother wants her grandson to see it like it is with his unpredictable parents. Knowing that she is fading fast, she needs Joey to hurry up and show that he can break the Pigza family mold by making a friend in the outside world. The only potential candidate, however, is Olivia Lapp Joey’s blind homeschooling partner, who brags that she is ‘blind as a brat’ and acts meaner to Joey the more desperate he gets for her friendship even if Joey senses there’s more to her than meets the eye. In this dazzling episode, Jack Gantos’s acclaimed hyperactive hero discovers that settling down isn’t good for anything if he can’t find a way to stop the people he cares about from winding him up all over again.

I Am Not Joey Pigza

I m a brand new man with a brand new plan. Joey Pigza is knocked for a loop when his good for nothing dad shows up on his doorstep as a recycled person. After a lucky lotto win, Carter Pigza truly believes he’s somebody else. He s even renamed himself Charles Heinz and he insists that Joey and his mother join his happy Heinz family plan. My head felt like it was full of bees, and they were busy in ways that were bad for me. Joey has little choice but to embrace a head spinning series of changes, which include having to leave school to help out at the beat up roadside diner his dad has purchased. But Joey is afraid that in going with the flow he will go over the falls and end up in a place far away from who he really is. In this seriously comic new novel, Jack Gantos pushes his acclaimed hero into entirely new territory, where he wrestles with issues of identity and forgiveness, and teaches himself how to triple flip a turkey burger while shouting out his new favorite phrase…
Do you want fries with that?

Dead End in Norvelt

Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is ‘grounded for life’ by his feuding parents, and whose nose spews bad blood at every little shock he gets. But plenty of excitement and shocks are coming Jack’s way once his mom loans him out to help a fiesty old neighbor with a most unusual chore typewriting obituaries filled with stories about the people who founded his utopian town. As one obituary leads to another, Jack is launced on a strange adventure involving molten wax, Eleanor Roosevelt, twisted promises, a homemade airplane, Girl Scout cookies, a man on a trike, a dancing plague, voices from the past, Hells Angels…
and possibly murder. Endlessly surprising, this sly, sharp edged narrative is the author at his very best, making readers laugh out loud at the most unexpected things in a dead funny depiction of growing up in a slightly off kilter place where the past is present, the present is confusing, and the future is completely up in the air. Dead End in Norvelt is a Publishers Weekly Best Children’s Fiction title for 2011.

Willy’s Raiders

Willy’s Raiders, who always play fair and square, prove the good guys always win when they go up for the championship against the Weasels, who resort to dirty tricks.

Zip Six

Prison friendship, betrayal tale, by ex inmate. Wonderful bounce, goofiness…
So much talent. The Washington Post

Desire Lines

When sixteen year old Walker gets caught up in a witch hunt against homosexuals, he is left to stand by and watch as a tragedy unfolds.

The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs

On an unseasonably warm Easter Sunday, a young girl namedIvy discovers a chilling secret in the baseme*nt of the Rumbaughpharmacy across the street from the hotel where she lives withher mother. The discovery reveals a disturbing side to theeccentric lives of family friends Abner and Adolph Rumbaugh,known throughout their small western Pennsylvania townsimply as the Twins. It seems that Ab and Dolph have beencompelled by a powerful mutual love for their deceased motherto do something extraordinary, something that in its owntwisted way bridges the gap between the living and the dead. Immediately, Ivy’s discovery provokes the revelation of aRumbaugh family curse, a curse that, as Ivy will learn over thecoming years, holds a strange power over herself and her ownmother. In his third book for young adults, Jack Gantos has scripted acompletely original drama. With gothic flavor and black humor,he depicts a group of people bound together by love,compulsion…
and a passion for taxidermy.

Fair-Weather Friends

Though best friends, Maggie and Chester must separate as she prefers to live in the North and he, the South.

Hole in My Life

Becoming a writer the hard wayIn the summer of 1971, Jack Gantos was an aspiring writer looking for adventure, cash for college tuition, and a way out of a dead end job. For ten thousand dollars, he recklessly agreed to help sail a sixty foot yacht loaded with a ton of hashish from the Virgin Islands to New York City, where he and his partners sold the drug until federal agents caught up with them. For his part in the conspiracy, Gantos was sentenced to serve up to six years in prison. In Hole in My Life, this prizewinning author of over thirty books for young people confronts the period of struggle and confinement that marked the end of his own youth. On the surface, the narrative tumbles from one crazed moment to the next as Gantos pieces together the story of his restless final year of high school, his short lived career as a criminal, and his time in prison. But running just beneath the action is the story of how Gantos once he was locked up in a small, yellow walled cell moved from wanting to be a writer to writing, and how dedicating himself more fully to the thing he most wanted to do helped him endure and ultimately overcome the worst experience of his life. Hole in My Life is a 2003 Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year.