I Am Not Joey Pigza, Jack Gantos
I Am Not Joey Pigza, Jack Gantos
3 Rating(s)
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I Am Not Joey Pigza

Author: Jack Gantos

Narrator: Jack Gantos

Unabridged: 4 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/24/2007


Synopsis

“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?”

About Jack Gantos

Jack Gantos has written books for people of all ages, from picture books and middle-grade fiction to novels for young adults and adults. His works include Hole in My Life, a memoir that won the Michael L. Printz and Robert F. Sibert Honors, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, a National Book Award Finalist, and Joey Pigza Loses Control, a Newbery Honor book. Jack was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, and when he was seven, his family moved to Barbados. He attended British schools, where there was much emphasis on reading and writing, and teachers made learning a lot of fun. When the family moved to south Florida, he found his new classmates uninterested in their studies, and his teachers spent most of their time disciplining students. Jack retreated to an abandoned bookmobile (three flat tires and empty of books) parked out behind the sandy ball field, and read for most of the day. The seeds for Jack’s writing career were planted in sixth grade, when he read his sister’s diary and decided he could write better than she could. He begged his mother for a diary and began to collect anecdotes he overheard at school, mostly from standing outside the teachers’ lounge and listening to their lunchtime conversations. Later, he incorporated many of these anecdotes into stories.  While in college, he and an illustrator friend, Nicole Rubel, began working on picture books. After a series of well-deserved rejections, they published their first book, Rotten Ralph, in 1976. It was a success and the beginning of Jack’s career as a professional writer. Jack continued to write children’s books and began to teach courses in children’s book writing and children’s literature. He developed the master’s degree program in children’s book writing at Emerson College and the Vermont College M.F.A. program for children’s book writers. He now devotes his time to writing books and educational speaking. He lives with his family in Boston, Massachusetts.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Betsy

A good author has the ability to piss off their fans. Pissing off fans is a delicate art, though. On the one hand, if you can emotionally engage your readers to the point where they are so invested in your characters that they consider them to be real people then you know you're a pretty darn good w......more

Goodreads review by Josiah

"Do you think it is just too easy to be something you are not?" I asked, thinking of Dad. "Easy in the beginning," she said. "But after a while even the made-up self starts to gather baggage, and before you know it you might just as well have stayed your old self." —I Am Not Joey Pigza, P. 215 Readi......more