The first story made me laugh out loud.  I thought it might be just an adult point of view that thought it was funny but my granddaughter thought so too.  A couple of boys discover the real reason their parents have an underground bomb shelter and it has nothing to do with the alien invasion or the zombie outbreak.

There was another funny little story about a first contact and how appearance can be everything.  Several of the stories use current technology to solve problems that children particularly have – like bullies.  And an entertaining one about the problems that can make someone tardy to school; in our world it would be called fantasy, in their world it’s just business as usual.

There’s one in the batch about what happens when a child doesn’t do their chores; like cleaning the cat litter.  What amused me most was that the child still didn’t learn their lesson even after it went very, very bad.

The fax machine story was a hoot but it’s already dated technology.  My granddaughter particularly liked a variation of the choose-your-own ending type of story.

Many of the stories were gruesome or gross but I guess you’d expect that of a middle-grade book.  And not all the children in these stories survive; maybe not even half of them, I lost count.  My granddaughter thought the best way to describe these stores was in the word:  creative. ~~  Catherine Book & Patrese Sharp

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