I initially got into Bruce Coville’s books the way a lot of my generation did–through the My Teacher is an Alien series. I think they may have been the first books I read that took real life and combined it with fantastic or supernatural elements. Before this, science fiction was something that took place far in the future with spaceships and whatnot.
From the My Teacher is an Alien series I moved on to his other series and books. There were the collections of short stories–ghosts, and aliens, and general horror–and more fantasy-oriented books, like Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher.
(I see that he did eventually write more of the Unicorn Chronicles. Only the first book was out while I was still a child, and I always though it was weird that a series with “chronicles” in the name only had one book.)
And, of course, there were more aliens–the Space Brat series, for example, and Aliens Ate My Homework.
He’s written a ton of books other than those, everything from picture books to YA novels. Over 100, according to both Wikipedia and his personal website. Good for him!
Now, I will fully own up to not touching a single one of these books since about the age of 12. I don’t know how they’ve held up. (I think I have the My Teacher is an Alien books floating around somewhere, but I think I’ll give it a few more years before I give them/read them to the small, mobile ones.) But as a kid, they were great. Most of them combined humor and horror and were just really fun reads.
Read any Bruce Coville books, squiders? I feel like he and Louis Sachar were the reading backdrop of my childhood, since both were so proficient and seemingly omnipresent. I certainly read other things and other people (as we’ve discussed) but these guys were everywhere.
What was a book that really impacted you when you were younger?
