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A review by margaretann84
Who Done It? by Jon Scieszka
4.0
The concept is great--get a whole bunch of authors together to explain why they didn't kill a particularly nasty editor. However, with eighty different authors on the roster, each writing between 1-5 pages on why they didn't do it...well, by about 2/3s of the way through, I just wanted to be done with it.
That's not to say the authors or their alibis were bad; far from it. Most of the alibis were pretty funny, and all the voices were unique. There was some repetition, of course, but why wouldn't there be, with so many contributors? It just ran too long. Maybe fifty authors? But who to cull? I just know the book would have been about perfect at 250, maybe 275 pages. The joke would still have been fresh.
The stand-out pieces for me were:
Libba Bray
Gayle Forman
Lev Grossman
David Levithan
Barnabas Miller
Todd Strasser
Overall, I'd recommend the anthology, but if I were to use it in class, I'd pick and choose what I wanted to use as an example of how the book works.
That's not to say the authors or their alibis were bad; far from it. Most of the alibis were pretty funny, and all the voices were unique. There was some repetition, of course, but why wouldn't there be, with so many contributors? It just ran too long. Maybe fifty authors? But who to cull? I just know the book would have been about perfect at 250, maybe 275 pages. The joke would still have been fresh.
The stand-out pieces for me were:
Libba Bray
Gayle Forman
Lev Grossman
David Levithan
Barnabas Miller
Todd Strasser
Overall, I'd recommend the anthology, but if I were to use it in class, I'd pick and choose what I wanted to use as an example of how the book works.