Reinventing yourself takes humor, heart, and a TON of footnotes! Max is a good kid—but you wouldn’t know that if you met him at the boring family camp his parents dragged him to over the summer. There, for a few exciting weeks, Max reinvents himself as “Mad Max” and gains a bad-boy reputation for being daring, cool, and fearless. But when Max returns home, he finds it’s easier to be fearless with strangers than it is among friends, and he is not particularly proud of the way his behavior over the summer hurt people. Can he find a way to merge his adventurous alter ego with his true identity as a good guy? Peppered with humorous handwritten footnotes and doodles throughout, Anyway* perfectly captures the viewpoint of a young teen doing his best to find his place in the world—and an ideal balance between wise guy and wimp. ...Salm has penned a deeply innovative tale that takes risks with the genre and succeeds wildly. "Conveys with keen perception the revelations that persona can be a choice and that people tend to take us as we offer ourselves; it's also sympathetically realistic about the need to calibrate that choice a little in the face of its consequences...The affable yet thoughtful treatment of shifting adolescent identity will ring true with kids thinking about changing their own reps, and it'll gratify readers that the nice guy definitely doesn't finish last."--"BCCB" "Everything about this book screams summer fun."--"The Washington Post" "In Max, Salm has created a likable everykid who's shy and caring, but who also possesses flashes of petulance, goofiness, self-doubt, and--yes--questionable decision making that make him very real. The 138 footnotes, set in a font that resembles hand-lettering, are smoothly integrated into the story and contribute to its easygoing, memoirlike pace."--"Publishers Weekly" Arthur Salm is a former newspaper columnist for the San Diego Union Tribune who now writes books full time. HIGH CAMP; SARA SLUGS AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL; TIME TRIALS All right, I’m going to tell you this story, and you tell me if you think it’s funny. I don’t, or at least I didn’t at first. But then, I’m the one who sat on the plate of spaghetti. Anyway, I’m Max. A good kid. Except for the time I decided I didn’t want to be a good kid anymore. That’s still going on, kind of. I just have bad luck with spaghetti. One time I made some to surprise my parents, and it was the most horrible stuff I’ve ever tasted in my life. They tried to be polite and eat a little of it, but as they chewed they got these really weird looks on their faces and finally they just spit it into their napkins. My mother said, “Max, what did you do to it? All you have to do is put it in boiling water.” I said, “You mean the water has to boil first?” My father took out his phone and said, “Pizza or Vietnamese?” I said, “Pizza.” They both said, “Vietnamese.” I said, “Okay, but with egg noodles,” and they got those same weird looks on their faces and said together, “No noodles!” So it was a Vietnamese with brown rice night. Not all my stories have happy endings. Here’s how it started. A few months ago, just before I finished seventh grade, my parents got it into their heads that after school was out for the summer, we had to go to this weeklong family camp in the mountains, just the three of us. They showed me a booklet with pictures of a swimming pool, a gigantic dining hall with a monster fireplace and picnic tables loaded with food, a lake with kayaking and fishing (although my parents made sure not to say the word “fishing” ), volleyball courts—about everything you could think of. “It says there are lots of youth activities,” my mom said. The camp really didn’t sound too bad, except for the cabin I’d have to share with my parents, and the almost all-day drive to get there. My dad likes to get on the freeway and just go , but my mom is always wanting us to go off on little side trips to see stuff. She says it’ll only take a few minutes. My brother Ben’s nineteen and in college now, so he gets out of stuff like that. I’ve been fishing exactly one time in my life, when this YMCA day camp took us deep-sea fishing. We had to get there so early, the sky was still black. I didn’t even know how to bait a hook. A counselor said he’d show me everything, but the boat wasn’t even out of the harbor before I started to get seasick, and I basically barfed for the whole four hours. In the middle of it all, I was sitting on a bench with my head between my knees, trying to figure out if moaning helped or made me feel worse. I was also trying to decide whether I was ready to throw up again. A kid sat down next to me and put his head between his knees too, and I thought, At least I’m not the only one. But what he was doing was getting his sack lunch from under the bench. He unwrapped a baloney sandwich and took a big bite. Then he looked over at me. He was chewing with his mouth open. “You look like you’re gonna barf again,” he