Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar

Hey, Story Seekers!

Somebody built a school wrong.

Wayside School was supposed to have thirty classrooms lined up next to each other.

Instead the builder stacked them.

Thirty stories high.

He was very sorry.

That doesn't fix the stairs, but it's nice that he apologized.

Sideways Stories from Wayside School is written by Louis Sachar, with illustrations by Adam McCauley in the HarperCollins edition we're exploring here. It's the first book in the Wayside School series, and this school has a way of making your own classroom look remarkably well organized.

I'm Jungle Jimmy the Book Explorer, children's author, dad, and longtime performer for kids. Along for the expedition is Readit the Book Worm, my childlike sidekick, who notices the details grown-ups walk straight past.

He already has a question.

Why isn't there a nineteenth floor?

Don't worry.

That does not get less confusing.

Book Breakdown

Most of the action happens up on the thirtieth floor.

That's where we meet a class including Joe, Todd, Bebe, John, Myron, Maurecia, Paul, Leslie, Kathy, Dana, Jason, Rondi, Terrence, Jenny and three boys named Eric.

Apparently one Eric wasn't enough.

The book gives us thirty short stories, and Sachar never pretends this is a normal school with one long sensible plot.

One chapter belongs to one kid.

The next belongs to somebody else.

Characters wander back through each other's stories, jokes circle around, and the whole class slowly becomes familiar even though the book keeps hopping between strange situations.

Strange is doing some work in that sentence.

Mrs. Gorf, the first teacher we meet, has an unusual method for dealing with children who misbehave.

She turns them into apples.

Todd keeps getting sent home early even when the trouble isn't his fault.

Joe somehow arrives at the right answers while counting things completely wrong.

John can read words only when they're upside down.

Jason gets into a chewing-gum situation I would prefer not to experience.

And Sammy is the new kid.

He smells terrible.

There are reasons.

Sachar tells all of it with a completely straight face, which is most of why it works. He never stops to announce that here comes the crazy part.

At Wayside the crazy part has already arrived and taken a seat.

Adam McCauley's black-and-white drawings give quick looks at the characters without turning this into a heavily illustrated reader. By third grade I like that balance. The pictures punctuate the weirdness; the words carry the trip.

For teachers and librarians: TeachingBooks lists Lexile 530L, ATOS 3.3, 20,395 words, AR quiz 5243, 3 points. A library record for the HarperCollins edition independently confirms AR middle grade 3.3 and 3 points. That edition runs 128 pages at ages 8 to 12, grades 3 to 7.

One edition note, because this book has been reillustrated more than once. The original 1978 Follett edition was illustrated by Dennis Hockerman. The widely available HarperCollins editions, including the one described here, use Adam McCauley. If you're matching a classroom set, check which one you have.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Here's why I wanted this on a third-grade shelf.

It's more than 20,000 words.

That sounds like a serious jump from Dog Man or The Bad Guys or Dory Fantasmagory.

But Sachar has quietly chopped the mountain into little hills.

Thirty stories.

A kid never has to think, "I have to get through this whole novel."

They get through Mrs. Gorf.

Then Joe.

Then Todd.

One more weird kid, one more weird problem.

That structure gives a developing reader somewhere to stop without dropping a giant plot thread, which is the single biggest reason long books get abandoned at this age.

It also makes the book excellent read-aloud material. You can visit Wayside for one story and leave.

Although leaving means walking down thirty flights of stairs.

Pack a snack.

The other thing I like is how much Sachar trusts kids.

Some of these stories are nonsense.

They are not empty nonsense.

There's usually a small idea hiding underneath. A kid gets blamed for something that wasn't his fault. Somebody decides nobody likes her. A character becomes important and has to work out what to do with that. Another kid sees the world differently from everybody else and still gets where he's going.

Sachar never turns around afterward to explain the lesson.

Thank you.

He lets the weird story do the work.

And a lot of the logic is the kind children love, because it almost makes sense.

Almost.

That's a dangerous amount of sense.

Enough that a third grader can argue with it.

Not enough that an adult can straighten it out.

Readit's Review

I knew Sammy was suspicious.

You cannot show up at school smelling THAT bad and expect nobody to ask questions.

Also Mrs. Gorf turns kids into apples.

How is she still a teacher?

Did nobody tell the principal?

And why do you need thirty floors for thirty classrooms?

Imagine forgetting your lunch on the first floor.

No.

I'm staying hungry.

I like that you don't have to wait forever for something weird to happen. Every chapter has somebody different doing something strange.

John reading upside down is actually kind of cool.

I tried it.

I'm not good at it.

And there are THREE Erics.

If the teacher says "Eric," what happens?

Do all three answer?

This school has problems.

I want to go there for one day.

One.

What Others Think

Wayside has had a long time to find its readers.

The first book came out in 1978, and Goodreads now has it at 4.16 out of 5 from 102,265 ratings across 83 editions. That is a large and very old pile of readers for a book in which the architecture is the least strange thing happening.

Two patterns come up again and again.

The first is nostalgia. A lot of adult reviewers met Wayside as children and report that Sachar's particular flavor of nonsense stayed with them long after the details of other childhood books had gone.

The second is that the short-story structure makes the book easy to talk about. Readers mention specific stories and specific kids rather than trying to summarize a plot, which is exactly how the book is built and a good sign for a classroom.

The professional response to the series has consistently landed in the same place. Kirkus describes Sachar's Wayside humor as anarchic and fast, with real appeal for early and middle-grade readers, and notes that underneath the frivolity there is often something worth thinking about.

There's another side to this humor, and it's worth saying plainly.

Wayside gets dark.

Children are turned into apples. Kids are punished unfairly. Adults are ridiculous or occasionally mean. Some of the jokes carry the slightly wicked feeling of a child discovering that books are allowed to misbehave.

For a lot of readers that is the entire attraction.

For a child who wants stories orderly and realistic, thirty chapters of impossible school logic will feel like somebody loosened all the screws.

They did.

That's Wayside.

Belly Laugh Scale

5 out of 5: Laugh-Out-Loud Legend

I'm giving Wayside the five, and not because every chapter hits equally hard. They don't, and after nearly fifty years some of them have aged better than others.

I'm giving it the five because Sachar built an entire comic universe out of the way children actually experience school.

Teachers have strange rules.

Getting in trouble isn't always fair.

Every classroom contains kids who seem to be operating under different laws of nature.

Adults say things that don't make sense.

Then Sachar pushes all of it until a teacher is turning students into fruit, and never once winks at you about it.

The short chapters help. If one joke isn't your favorite, there's another floor coming.

Another chapter.

Please don't make me climb this school again.

Final Explorer Verdict

I'd hand Sideways Stories from Wayside School to third and fourth graders ready for a longer book, kids who like absurd humor, readers who prefer short chapters, school-story fans, reluctant novel readers who don't want one giant plot, and children who enjoy arguing about things that make no sense whatsoever.

It fills a specific spot.

Dog Man gives kids comics.

The Bad Guys gives them an illustrated bridge.

Dory Fantasmagory gives them a longer story with pictures still helping.

Wayside asks them to carry considerably more of the reading themselves.

And it refuses to become serious about it.

That's the part I like most. A child doesn't graduate into longer books and lose the right to read about a terrible-smelling new kid named Sammy or a teacher who turns children into apples.

Reading stamina can grow.

The weird stuff can stay.

I vote that it stays.

Readit does too.

He's still working on the nineteenth floor.

I'm not helping.

Until our next expedition, keep exploring those books.

Jungle Jimmy & Readit