The Boys Start the War

Overview

Just when the Hatford brothers were expecting three boys to move into the house across the river, where their best friends, the Bensons, used to live, the Malloys arrive instead. Wally and his brothers decide to make Caroline and her sisters so miserable that they'll want to go back to Ohio, but they haven't counted on the ingenuity of the girls.

From dead fish to dead bodies, floating cakes to floating heads, the pranks and tricks continue -- first by the boys, then the girls -- until someone is taken prisoner! Will the Malloys leave West Virginia? Will the Bensons come back? Trust the four Hatford boys and the three Malloy girls to do anything to get one up on each other in this fun-filled war of the wits.

Readers will cheer for their favorites in this lively story of two feuding families written by Newbery Medal winner Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

Watch for the continuing chronicles of the Hatfords and the Malloys in The Girls Get Even.

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews for this product are not available at this time.

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."

Customer Reviews

There are no customer reviews available at this time. To add your review, Register or Sign In to your account using our free eBook Library Software.

Additional Info

Imprint

Yearling

Filesize

1.11 MB

Number of Pages

144

eBook ISBN

9780307514851