I read the final pages of Weird kid listening to live music. The guitarist was phenomenal - as was the book.

Greg has a particular knack for polishing up all the bits I love about science fiction and packaging it into that middle-grade goldilocks zone. Perfect humor and pacing for its target audience while maintaining the heart and mind of a story a fan of any age could enjoy.

Weird Kid has the best dog, 2 friends bonding over their love of comics, a kid bonding over music with his uncle and an entire town overrun with

Spoiler

alien goo

. The book lives up to its adjective. It gets weird. Strike that. It starts weird, but it's easy to write off some of the initial weird happenings as the overactive imagination of the main character. As things get a sciency explanation the weirdness and the stakes escalate.

Greg has fun with words, smushing them together like the dictionary of Dr. Moreau. Greg writes clearly about difficult topics like the loss of a parent. Greg writes equally clearly about butts. The chorus that Greg returns to is the power of love and acceptance.

I'd say this is the perfect book to get your middle schooler hooked on science fiction, but it's the fourth of Greg's I'd say that about. Together they give a pretty good survey of what drew me to science fiction and keeps me reading it 30 years later.