Shelly's Book Blog

In Jake Wizner's Spanking Shakespeare, 17-year-old Shakespeare Shapiro is writing his memoir. All seniors at his high school are required to do so as a senior project, but not all of them are the talented humorist that Shakespeare is. Shakespeare has a brother named Gandhi, so it seems clear that their parents were not into conventional, boring names for their children. Shakespeare suffers from the usual teen boy angst, the difference here being that he knows how to write about it in a very amusing, if coarse, style. This is not one to recommend to kids under, say, 16, but for older teens and young adults who don't mind Wizner's irreverence, this is a really funny book.