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Boys Rock!

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Overview

Wally Hatford dreams of long lazy days far away from school and Caroline Malloy. But Wally, the best speller among the Hatford brothers, gets roped into helping them with a summer newspaper project that will earn the twins school credit.
What does that get Wally? When he hears scratching noises coming from Oldakers' bookstore cellar, Mr. Oldaker trusts him to keep a secret that could turn into a scoop for their newspaper. Wally worries that the secret may be too scary to keep to himself.
What's worse, the Malloy girls have horned in on the newspaper. If there's one person Wally won't spill his secret to, it's nutty Caroline Malloy. No matter what it is!

Editorial Reviews

Gr 3-5-It's summer and while Wally Hatford would rather sit around and watch a spider weave its web, he agrees to help his brothers. If Jake and Josh can create a historical town newspaper, they will get credit for reading three books on their summer list. As a gesture of good will, since they are 99 percent certain that the Malloy sisters will be returning to Ohio in the fall, they ask the girls to join them. When Eddie declares herself editor-in-chief, the one-upmanship that's a trademark of this series starts. All of the kids have a job on the paper; Wally and Peter are in charge of distribution, Beth investigates a haunted house, the twins write historical sports stories, and Caroline interviews citizens about their ancestors. When Wally asks the owner of Oldakers' Bookstore if he can display copies of the Hatford Herald, he hears a strange noise coming from its basement. Mr. Oldaker promises him a scoop for the paper if he can keep the information a secret. When mistakes are printed in the paper, the girls learn a valuable lesson about fact-checking, and they also learn that the boys will strike if they don't have their own way. Although the characters are mostly one-dimensional, the story has its funny moments. Fans of the series will eat it up.-Tina Zubak, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Author Information

Bio of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Newbery Medalist Phyllis Reynolds Naylor grew up in Anderson, Indiana, and Joliet, Illinois. She wrote her first book when she was in kindergarten and sold her first story when she was 16 for $4.67. Naylor worked as a teacher and an editor before she began to write full-time in 1960. Her first book, about a disastrous first marriage to a man who became mentally ill, was for adults. She sold her first book for children in 1965. Since then, she has written more than 80 books for children and adults. Her book Boys in Control, features the return of young readers' favorite feuding families--the Hatford boys and the Malloy girls--from her earlier books, The Boys Start the War, The Girls Get Even, and Boys Against Girls. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor lives in Bethesda, Maryland with her husband, Rex who is a speech pathologist. They have two grown sons and two granddaughters. "I think I wanted to be a writer because my parents read aloud to us every night until we were about 15 years old. They read Grimm's fairy tales, the Bible storybook, all of Mark Twain's books, Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows--and I think I probably felt that if listening to stories was so much fun, writing them would be even better. And it is. I love being involved in the characters and plot and just the whole mess of writing, it's such a wonderful mess to me. "I would like readers to develop more tolerance for people who are different, for ideas that are different, to come to realize that sometimes there isn't just one right way to do something. People see different possibilities in a situation, and the solutions they come up with may be very different." About the Boy-Girl Battle Books "It's always fun for me to do another book in the Boy-Girl Battle Books series. I think I enjoy them as much as the kids, and according to the stacks of letters I receive, they like them a lot. The idea for the series came to me when I was speaking at a school, and as the kids filed noisily into the gym, one teacher yelled, 'If you don't settle down, I'm going to seat you boy/girl/boy/girl.' The gym was so quiet you could hear nothing but breathing. 'Aha!' I thought. The universal theme! The antagonism between boys and girls, ages 9 to 12. In one chapter, the girls may be one up on the boys; in the next, the boys may have the upper hand. There will be 12 books in all, and already the kids are asking, 'Who wins the war?' My lips are sealed."

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Additional Info

Imprint

Yearling

Filesize

676.53 KB

Number of Pages

144

eBook ISBN

9780307514844

Excerpt from: Boys Rock! by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Starting Now It was the day after the Fourth of July. The sun was warm, the air was breezy, and time was moving slowly, just the way Wally liked it. No clock telling him to get up, no bell ringing for class--just twelve hours stretching out before him, with only a wisp of leftover firework smoke in his nostrils. But Wally Hatford had come to a decision. Since he was ninety-nine percent sure that the Malloy girls would be moving back to Ohio when summer was over, he didn't want any guilt feelings hanging around once they were gone. So he was going to be super-nice to them. Well, maybe not super-nice. Maybe not even nice, exactly. But he would probably be polite. Okay, maybe not polite polite, but he certainly wasn't going to do anything to make them mad. Especially Caroline. Wally had just finished reading the first book on his summer reading list,A Ghost's Revenge, and it was one of the creepiest, scariest stories he had ever read. The book said that each person has a ghostly self that shadows him all the time, whether he knows it or not. When the person dies, the ghost takes over, but even when the person is alive, that ghostly self can make its presence known if it gets mad enough. Sometimes it even latches on to that person's enemy and haunts him for a while. Forever, even! In the story, a man cheated his neighbor, and after a time the neighbor moved away, but the neighbor's ghost didn't. It hung around to get even. Everything the man tried to do went wrong. His vegetables wouldn't grow, his car broke down, his dog got sick, and his roof caught fire. This worried Wally a lot. It was only a story, of course. Wally knew that. But if the Malloy girls moved back to Ohio, where they used to live, Wally did not want their ghostly selves, if they had any, hanging around him. If they moved away, he did not want one of those ghostly selves--especially Caroline's--trying to settle a score with the boy who maybe hadn't treated her as well as he could have. It was only a piece of nonsense, but it didn't stop Wally from dreaming that he heard a scritch, scratch, scritch in the cellar. Then a soft thump, thumpity, thump on the stairs. Then a creak, crickety, creak of the floorboards in his bedroom, and then an icy hand. . . . "Yipe!" Wally said aloud, suddenly snapping to attention as his twin brothers came out on the porch. "What's the matter with you? Got ants in your pants?" said Jake as he flopped down on the glider and Josh took a wicker chair. Wally had been sitting on the floor, leaning against a post. "Something like that," said Wally, giving his head a shake. If Mom and Dad knew all the tricks he and his brothers had played on those Malloy girls, Wally thought . . . ! Of course, the girls had played their share of pranks too, but the truth was, the boys had started it. And though Wally had usually gone along reluctantly, he had definitely been involved. He had most certainly done things he shouldn't have. A ghostly presence would remember that. Wally didn't care if their vegetables didn't grow, but he didn't want their car to break down or their roof to catch fire, just because he hadn't been nicer to Caroline Malloy. Jake stretched his long legs out in front of him and pulled a sheet of paper from his jeans pocket. After unfolding it section by section, he pointed to the print at the top of the page. "Listen, Wally," he said. "You want to be in on something? If Josh and I put out a neighborhood newspaper, that counts as three books on our summer reading list. You want to help out?" By now, Wally had learned that whenever Jake had an idea, alarm bells should go off right, left, and every which way from Sunday. Still, a newspaper might be fun. . . . "Just any kind of newspaper?" he asked. "It has to be three issues of a newspaper about historica