When I was a kid, I loved reading biographies about famous leaders. I was fascinated by the childhoods of politicians, leaders, and celebrities. How did someone go from being a kid like me to being a world changer? David Stabler's Kid Legends series answers that question with fact and humor.

From Roald Dahl's childhood as a top-secret taste tester for Cadbury to Judy Blume's ride in the Goodyear blimp, Stabler captures fascinating moments in the lives of famous authors. Along the way, he explores how their childhood experiences influenced their writing. Some authors, like Langston Hughes, sought freedom in the walls of the local library. For others, like Beverly Cleary, reading and writing didn't come easily.

Students will love this well-told compilation of favorite authors' childhood stories. I can see students returning to this book over and over as they read more books by the respective authors. It's a great addition to classroom bookshelves.

Classroom Connections

This book can serve as a strong mentor text for writing biographies. Stabler's writing is clear, but also humorous and engaging. Students who are writing their own biographies will benefit from using Stabler's writing as a mentor for pace and structure.

This book would make a great nonfiction read aloud in middle grade classrooms. The chapters are manageable for daily read aloud, life lessons are taught through the stories, and students may be inspired to pick up the authors' books after reading. I'll be adding this to my third grade read aloud shortlist for this school year!

Roald Dahl era un assaggiatore segreto di cioccolata; Jules Verne naufragò nella Loira, finendo per qualche ora su un isolotto; J. K. Rowling dovette combattere contro i bulli, come l'irresistibile Lewis Carrol, nonostante il suo fisico fragile; Edgar Allan Poe invece era un po' bullo, mentre Mark Twain era scatenato, quanto e più il suo Tom Sawyer.

Sedici autori, sedici infanzie, sbocciate in opere che hanno influenzato generazioni di lettori.

Ed è bello, che siano state vicende liete o tristi, vedere come sono state superate, seminando grande letteratura.

Delizioso, come il precedente Kid artists: e come Kid artists, mi auguro di cuore che venga portato in Italia da qualche illuminato editore. ^^

Opening line:
"Everybody loves a good story--and we all know that a well-told story has a beginning, a middle, and an end."

This was a fun and quick book to read. Little interesting insights to a few writers with cute illustrations for each.
Ronald, aka, J.R.R. Tolkein was bit on the foot by a Baboon Tarantula. They are ginormous! Remind you of anything spiders in his stories?
Roald Dahl loved candy. When he was thirteen he was sent to a dismal school BUT it doubled as an undercover testing lab for Cadbury! He us to daydream about the inside of that factory.
Sam, or Samuel Clemens or Mark Twain (his name has something to do with boats...) us to get into all sorts of mischief with his best bud, Tom.
There are more snippets of interesting facts about more kid authors at the end of the book
I think this would be a great addition to any home or classroom.

Thanks to netgalley for the early read!

This is a great collection of stories from the childhoods of famous authors. I loved reading these vignettes from the lives of authors that I love and authors that I know my students love, too. The stories are written with just enough embellishment that they're exciting and entertaining, and I was very pleased with how inspirational as well as entertaining many of the stories were. 

This would be great to use in a classroom as part of an author study, or just to read through to discuss themes of perseverance. I definitely plan to share some of these stories at the beginning of the year to direct my students to some authors they may not have tried before.

An interesting and sometimes humorous look at the lives of popular authors.  The format follows that of the other popular "Kid" books, giving you an overview of their lives that led to writing. The other "Kid" books are almost constantly checked out at the middle school library I work in, and I anticipate this will be as well.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading about so many favorite authors' childhoods and inspirations for their writing.  This will make a great additions to the classroom to show students the author connections to real life and their writing life.

As a children's librarian, I have several guidelines in evaluating nonfiction: Is the subject matter appropriate for the audience, and is it accurate?  Kid Authors fell short on both counts. A wide range of authors are included. Some like Jeff Kinney will clearly interest today's kid. Others may be unfamiliar, like Zora Neale Hurston and Jules Verne, but certainly worth learning about. However the vocabulary ranges from simplistic to this final phrase about Edgar Allen Poe: "theatrical panache of a master thespian" I think the author should pick a style that is understandable to a 9-12 year old and stick with it. 
I'm also not convinced that most kids if left to their own devices care about the origins of writers. If this is for a school assignment, this format really wouldn't provide the kind of information students are looking for.
 Distilling information for this age range can be challenging. How much to include and how nuanced should it be. Some of these entries appear to be lifted from interviews and memoirs, and I won't argue with the memories of the author being spotlighted, but I did feel that Stabler owed it to his audience to check the information with other sources. One example stood out as he described Judy Blume reading "the latest Nancy Drew murder mystery...which she bought almost every week with her allowance." First the Nancy Drew mysteries, certainly in the early years, dealt more with burglaries and kidnapping than murder, and checking Wikipedia for publication information, I learned a new adventure came out yearly, not weekly. These may seem like petty issues, but if simple efforts on my part at fact checking brought up questions, I would expect the author to do better. 
The purpose of this book and the others in this series seems to be to show kids that even our most well-known and loved heroes had challenges to overcome, and readers should thus be inspired to do the same. This is a worthy goal, but I wish the author had allowed the stories to unfold without hitting the reader over the head about fighting bullies and being loners. 
One plus in this book are the charming illustrations by Doogie Horner. They should definitely appeal to the fans of today's graphic novels.
In conclusion, I don't feel this would be a good addition to my library although there may be individual kids curious to know more about the childhoods of classic authors.

The newest book in the Kid Legends series doesn't disappoint.  This book gives childhood details for well-known authors lives.  This book includes both current well-known authors, like Jeff Kinney and J.K. Rowling, and others that are more "classic", such as Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain.  Hopefully the end matter at final publishing will include a list of titles that each author has written, because there were one or two that I wasn't familiar with, and didn't know what they had even written.

Snapshots into the childhoods of favorite authors. This book made me smile, laugh aloud, and give mental high fives to the authors when relatable stories resonated with my own childhood. This will definitely have a place in my classroom library!

Loved this book! The stories are cute and the chapters are short. It encourages kids to get to know these authors because of the interesting stories.

A collection of mini bios of famous authors as children and their paths to writing. This is part of a wonderful series that's great for middle grades. There are about 15 authors included, from different backgrounds and decades, contemporary ones too. I loved the one about Stan Lee. Fun illustrations and a short section of additional introductions to more writers at the end.

Net Galley Feedback

I've worked in a middle school media center for 2 years and the one thing I have learned is that if a book doesn't capture a student's interest in the first paragraph and maintain it to the next page, that student will not read the book.

What I like about this is the selection of authors.  Don't like Tolkien?  Okay go on to the next.  Maybe by the end a child might want to go back to read about Tolkien.  As an adult, this is a very fast read but to a middle schooler, it's a good pace.  A child can jump around from story to story without losing any plot points.  It's set up like a "Chicken Soup for the Soul" book but is more entertaining.  Really a solid effort and I will be recommending this to our book buyer.