Weird Weirder Weirdest: a Collection of Quirky Tales by Martii Maclean
Published: February 2017
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Weird Weirder Weirdest is a collection of short stories for children with Twilight Zone twists. Each story features a new character who gets into a fantastical situation and is changed forever.
As with all short story collections, some stories are more memorable than others. “Hands Free,” a science-fiction tale where friends bond over reading across dystopian social classes, was particularly strong. “The Crack,” though only a few pages long, was an entertaining mind-bender. “Fashion Victim” had believable characters and provided the book a strong finish.
“Just Desserts” begins as an interesting story about bullying, but the magical solution was a little too pat. “The Patchwork Girl” was a fairy tale with an appealing horror twist but slow delivery, and the message was heavy-handed. There were also some formatting errors in my version throughout, mostly stray HTML popping into the text here and there, but nothing too obtrusive.
There was more to like here than not, and the book was a solid 4th grade/5th grade read. The reading level would also be simple enough for advanced readers in earlier grades. I know I would have enjoyed it when I was in elementary school; curious, vaguely supernatural stories were just what I was always looking for.