Sideways Stories from Wayside School

I read Sideways Stories from Wayside School when I was eight, and I remember thinking that it was the first book that understood how strange school felt. The classrooms, the rules, the adults who seemed to operate on a logic that only they could see: Sachar took all of it and made it literal. Wayside School was built sideways. The classrooms are stacked thirty stories high, one per floor, and the nineteenth story does not exist. That is not a metaphor. It is the premise, and the book commits to it.

Louis Sachar published the novel in 1978. The edition I own is the Scholastic paperback from 2010, which runs 124 pages. The first edition was published by Follett and illustrated by Dennis Hockerman. The book is a short story cycle, with thirty chapters, each one focused on a different student or teacher. It is a children's book, but it is also a master class in comic structure. Each chapter sets up a rule, pushes it to an absurd conclusion, and then lands a joke that is both inevitable and surprising.

The building

Wayside School was supposed to be one story tall with thirty classrooms in a row. The builder made a mistake and built thirty stories with one classroom on each floor. The thirtieth floor is where Mrs. Jewls's class meets. There is no nineteenth floor. The book apologizes for the missing chapter and moves on.

The building is the book's central joke, and Sachar uses it in different ways. The stairs are a problem. The playground is far away. The lunchroom is somewhere below. The geography of the school creates opportunities for jokes about distance, time, and the difficulty of getting anywhere. But the building is also a metaphor for the way children experience school: a large, confusing system with rules that do not always make sense.

Mrs. Gorf and Mrs. Jewls

The first chapter introduces Mrs. Gorf, the worst teacher in the school. She turns students into apples if they misbehave or give a wrong answer. The students live in fear of her. Louis, the yard teacher, keeps visiting and assuming that the apples on her desk are gifts from grateful children. He does not realize that the apples are his students.

Eventually, Mrs. Gorf turns all the students into apples. The students, led by Todd, force her to turn them back. Then Jenny holds up a mirror, and Mrs. Gorf turns herself into an apple. Louis comes in, sees the apple, shines it on his shirt, and eats it. That is the end of Mrs. Gorf. It is also the end of the first chapter, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.

Mrs. Jewls replaces her. She is a better teacher, but she is not normal. When she first sees the children, she thinks they are monkeys because they are so cute. The students have to convince her that they are human. She is also literal in a way that creates problems. She gives Calvin a note to deliver to Miss Zarves on the nineteenth floor, even though there is no nineteenth floor and no Miss Zarves. Calvin goes anyway, because he is a good student.

The students

The book's structure means that each chapter is a small portrait. Joe cannot count, but he always gets the right answer. Mrs. Jewls tries to teach him, but he does not understand her method. Then one day he wakes up and can count. He counts every hair on his head: 55,006. The joke is not just that he can count. It is that the skill arrived without explanation, the way most childhood skills do.

Sharie has big eyelashes and a coat that is too big. She sleeps through class. Mrs. Jewls thinks this is fine because students learn best when they are sleeping. One day Sharie falls out the window while she is asleep. Louis saves her. The chapter is short, and it ends with a joke about how heavy she is. It is dark and funny, which is the book's signature.

Todd is a good student who is always in trouble. Mrs. Jewls has a three-strike system. First, your name goes on the board. Then a checkmark. Then a circle, and you are sent home on the kindergarten bus. Todd gets in trouble because he is the first student to speak out loud in class. The rules are arbitrary, and Todd is the victim of that arbitrariness. The chapter is one of the funniest in the book because it captures the feeling of being punished for something you did not understand.

Bebe Gunn is the fastest draw in art class. She can draw a cat in under forty-five seconds. She makes 378 works of art in an hour. Mrs. Jewls tells her that quality matters more than quantity. Bebe goes home to start a single picture of a cat, and she says she will probably still be working on it the next day. The chapter is a gentle lesson about art, but it is also a joke about the way adults ruin things by explaining them.

Maurecia eats ice cream every day until she gets tired of it. Mrs. Jewls invents ice cream flavors based on each student. Everyone likes Maurecia's flavor best, but Maurecia likes Todd's. The chapter is a love story told through frozen dessert. It is silly, and it is also sweet. Paul pulls Leslie's pigtails, gets sent home, and may or may not have pulled the third pigtail. Jason gets stuck to his chair with gum, and Joy kisses him to free him. These chapters are not trying to teach anything. They are trying to make the reader laugh, and they succeed.

The three Erics and the small tragedies

The three Erics are Eric Bacon, Eric Fry, and Eric Ovens. They are all named Eric, and they all have nicknames that do not match their personalities. Eric Bacon is skinny and called "Fatso." Eric Fry is athletic and called "Butterfingers." Eric Ovens is nice and called "Crabapple." The nicknames are cruel, and the chapter shows how children enforce stereotypes even when they know they are wrong. It is one of the few chapters that has a real bite.

Allison is kind and generous, but she has a short temper. She threatens to knock people's teeth out, and she supposedly did it to Rondi. She returns favors to everyone she meets. At the end of the chapter, Mrs. Jewls tells her a secret: students are smarter than their teachers. Allison says everyone knows that. The chapter is a gift to the reader. It is the book's way of saying that children understand more than adults give them credit for.

Dameon has to run up and down thirty flights of stairs to ask Louis a question about a movie. Louis keeps asking more questions. By the time Dameon gets back, the movie is over. Dameon missed it, so he writes a paper saying that turtles are too slow. The chapter is a joke about the school's architecture, but it is also about the way children are asked to do impossible things and then blamed when they fail.

The surreal

Some chapters are pure surrealism. Sammy arrives on a rainy day wearing many raincoats. He is rude and smelly. Mrs. Jewls removes the raincoats one by one, and each one is smellier than the last. Underneath all the coats is a dead rat. Mrs. Jewls throws him away. The chapter is gross and funny, and it has no moral. It is a reminder that children's books do not have to teach a lesson.

Deedee has a problem: she cannot get a good ball at recess. The class is on the thirtieth floor, so by the time she gets to the playground, the good balls are gone. Her solution is to disguise herself as a dead rat. Mrs. Jewls throws her out the window, and she gets to the playground early. The chapter is a perfect example of Sachar's logic. The solution is absurd, but it follows from the rules of the world.

John can only read upside down. Mrs. Jewls tells him to stand on his head. He tries, but his head is round and he keeps falling over. Eventually, he falls on his face, and the fall flips his brain over. He can read normally. Then Mrs. Jewls asks him to put a pillow under her desk and get a lollipop from the can on top, and he puts the pillow on top instead. The chapter is a joke about following instructions and the limits of a cure.

The teachers and the adults

Louis, the yard teacher, is the book's most important adult. He is kind, a little clueless, and always ready to play. He is also the author. The final chapter reveals that Louis is the writer of the book. He tells the class a story about a normal school where children are never turned into apples and teachers do not sleep through class. The students find the story boring and boo him. The joke is on the reader who expected a moral.

Miss Zarves is the teacher who does not exist. The nineteenth chapter is missing because there is no nineteenth floor. The book apologizes for the missing chapter and moves on. It is a structural joke that works because the book refuses to explain it. The absence is the point.

Kathy hates everyone, especially the reader. She has never met the reader, but she hates them anyway. She locks her cat in a closet to prove that it will run away, and it does. She refuses to catch a ball and gets hit. She does not eat a cookie until it is stale. The chapter is a portrait of a child who has decided that the world is against her, and who arranges her life to prove it. It is funny, and it is sad.

What the book gets right

Sideways Stories from Wayside School is a great book about school because it takes the absurdity seriously. The teachers are not villains. They are adults with their own weird logic. The students are not angels. They are people who are trying to figure out the rules. The building is impossible, but the feelings are real.

Sachar's prose is simple without being flat. He uses short sentences, quick dialogue, and repetition. The chapters are short enough to read aloud, and the jokes are timed like stand-up comedy. The book is also surprisingly dark. Mrs. Gorf is eaten. Sammy is a dead rat. Kathy is consumed by hatred. The darkness is part of the appeal. Children like stories that acknowledge that the world can be scary and strange.

Where it creaks

The book is episodic. There is no overarching plot, and some chapters are much stronger than others. The three Erics chapter is sharp, but the Rondi chapter is a one-joke sketch. The book also has some dated language and stereotypes. The chapter about the three Erics, in particular, uses fat jokes that may not land with every reader.

The structure means that the book is easy to put down. It does not build to a climax. The final chapter is a meta-joke rather than a resolution. Readers who want a story with a beginning, middle, and end may find the book unsatisfying.

Why it lasts

What makes the book last is its respect for children's intelligence. Sachar does not explain every joke. He does not tell the reader what to feel. He trusts the reader to understand that Mrs. Gorf turning into an apple is funny and horrible at the same time. He trusts the reader to see that the three Erics are being cruel, and that Kathy is hurting.

I read the book again as an adult, and it held up. The jokes are still funny. The darkness is still there. The building is still impossible. It is a book about school that understands that school is a place where children learn the rules of a world they did not make. Sometimes those rules are absurd. Sometimes they are cruel. Sometimes they are funny. Sachar gets all of that into 124 pages.