Baloney (Henry P.)

Trust the ultracreative author/illustrator pair, Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, the Time Warp Trio series, and more), to mastermind a plot this bizarre and yet somehow familiar to any school kid. Sure, Henry P. Baloney is a cute, saucer-eyed, green alien, but he has problems just like you and me--such as the threat of Permanent Lifelong Detention. Remarkably, as Scieszka reports in his afterword, when he received and decoded the transmission of this story (directly from deep space, mind you), it was written in a combination of many Earth languages, including Finnish, Swahili, Latvian, Esperanto, and Inuktitut (decoder included). Go figure.

Caldecott Honor artist Lane Smith must have spent a lot of time in detention, doodling away the hours. His weird, wild, wonderful pictures tell at least half the story, illustrating for readers' enlightenment just what a zimulis ("pencil" in Latvian) or speelplaats (Dutch for "playground") looks like. Fans of this ingenious pair will not be disappointed and may even make a twrf (Welsh for "noise") of joy! (Ages 5 to 9) --Emilie Coulter

Product Description
Who is Henry P. Baloney? An alien schoolkid who has to think of a very good reason for being late to szkola again. Otherwise it is Permanent Lifelong Detention.

This New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller follows Henry’s tall tale of his lost zimulis with graphically created piksas that help explain just exactly what Henry is talking about. An out-of-this-world experience, the book is told in at least twenty different Earth languages, and is probably the best excuse ever for being late to szkola.