Lawn and Road Wienies Book Reviews

Title: In the Land of the Lawn Weenies
Invasion of the Road Weenies
Author: David Lubar

These two collections of short stories were surprise hits in our household. Surprise because both the titles and cover illustrations are not very appealing. But you "can't judge a book by its cover" of course and so we dove in to the books to see what we would find. And what we found were fun collections of (and I'm struggling here for the correct adjective) odd, strange, creepy (from my eight year old) stories (the subtitle to both books is "And Other Warped and Creepy Tales". The stories in these two books are very reminiscent of old twilight zone episodes in that they portray a reality that is more or less twisted in some fantastic way. Twisted in a fantastic and deadly manner - in most of the stories the main characters do not survive the end of the story (though their ending is not described- just assumed.) The kids who meet these fates, tend to be the most unlikeable examples of middle school age boys and girls - bullies and disagreeable brats all around.

Probably because of the age of the main characters and their tendency to die at the end of the stories, these books were in the young adult section of our local library, though the reading level is probably around the fourth or fifth grade level. Because of this and because the stories are fairly short and easy to dig into, I could see these books being a good choice for the reluctant middle school reader. They were a Little too "creepy" for my eight year old.