Best Shorts: Favorite Short Stories for Sharing

I used two stories in this book for my 5th grade class and they loved the stories. The same cannot be said for the stories in their reading textbook. The Woman in the Snow is one of the stories. I used it just after Obama's inauguration and had my students write a literary response set in November 2008. It is great to expose them to good literature that calls for inference and critical thinking. The other story I used was The Night of the Pomegranate. I used it the week of the science fair and it launched a great discussion about the merits of experience and communicating your experience in ways the teacher can evaluate. The students produced an art project showing the Milky Way, Big and Little Dippers, Polaris and Mars in response to the story. We were also studying constellations in science so we were able to tie multiple subjects together and explore information from different angles. One of my non-readers was so excited by the book that he asked his dad to buy him a copy!

I was looking for an anthology for students who read between the 4th and 7th grade level, something other than the typical core by the big publishers. The stories are well written, captivating, and present an array of genre. Best of all, my students love the book.

Even though these short stories were collected with young or teen readers in mind, I found many of them highly entertaining and some even made me laugh out loud on the underground train where I was reading them!

In BEST SHORTS, you never know what surprise you're going to get next. Unlike many short story collections, which usually revolve around some thread of a theme, the stories Avi selected for this anthology come from all over the genre spectrum. The one thing they all have in common, however, is that they are all great little adventures you can experience without the big time commitment of an entire novel. Readers can get freaked out by seeing what happens when Dad loses his cell phone at Auntie's funeral, travel along with some city-smart boys who try to camp out alone, and root for an entire bank who adopts a baby abandoned in the night-deposit box. It's pretty slick how a well-written short story can suck you in; before you know it, you're reading a genre that you are sure you don't like. An interesting thing that happened to me as I read this compilation of stories is that I enjoyed stories in genres that I may never have picked up if they had been labeled. As I read these stories to my sixth-grade students, they wanted to get copies of their own. They, too, enjoyed the punch in these stories and the wide variety of styles and genres. How can you go wrong with a book featuring stories from such authors as Richard Peck, Lloyd Alexander, Washington Irving, Theodore Taylor, and even Avi himself? If you're looking for a sampler of authors or genres, or a few short stories to read between novels, or something to read without committing to an entire book, or you just feel like something a little different, then try BEST SHORTS on for size. It is one of those one-size-fits-all kind of collections. Reviewed by: Dianna Geers

Avi draws on her Newberry credentials and years of writing experience to select short stories old and modern ranging from mysteries and science fiction to adventure and more, for a powerful gathering perfect for introducing kids to the short story format. Louis Untermeyer, Theodore Tyler, Natalie Babbitt, Patricia McKissack and others all share the limelight with powerful creations kids will relish.