Space Station Seventh Grade [Turtleback]

Jerry Spinelli (Author)

Product Details

• Turtleback
• Publisher: Demco Media (September 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0606014276
• ISBN-13: 978-0606014274
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,868,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Growing up, Jerry Spinelli was really serious about baseball. He played for the Green Sox Little League team in his hometown of Norristown, Pennsylvania, and dreamed of one day playing for the major leagues, preferably as shortstop for the New York Yankees.

One night during high school, Spinelli watched the football team win an exciting game against one of the best teams in the country. While everyone else rode about town tooting horns in celebration, Spinelli went home and wrote "Goal to Go," a poem about the game's defining moment, a goal-line stand. His father submitted the poem to the Norristown Times-Herald and it was featured in the middle of the sports page a few days later. He then traded in his baseball bat for a pencil, because he knew that he wanted to become a writer.

After graduating from Gettysburg College with an English degree, Spinelli worked full time as a magazine editor. Every day on his lunch hour, he would close his office door and craft novels on yellow magazine copy paper. He wrote four adult novels in 12 years of lunchtime writing, but none of these were accepted for publication. When he submitted a fifth novel about a 13-year-old boy, adult publishers once again rejected his work, but children's publishers embraced it. Spinelli feels that he accidentally became an author of children's books.

Spinelli's hilarious books entertain both children and young adults. Readers see his life in his autobiography Knots in My Yo-Yo String, as well as in his fiction. Crash came out of his desire to include the beloved Penn Relays of his home state of Pennsylvania in a book, while Maniac Magee is set in a fictional town based on his own hometown.

When asked if he does research for his writing, Spinelli says: "The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first 15 years of my life turned out to be one big research project. I thought I was simply growing up in Norristown, Pennsylvania; looking back now I can see that I was also gathering material that would one day find its way into my books."

On inspiration, the author says: "Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey."

Spinelli lives with his wife and fellow writer, Eileen, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. While they write in separate rooms of the house, the couple edits and celebrates one another's work. Their six children have given Jerry Spinelli a plethora of clever material for his writing.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars best book ever read, February 23, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Space Station Seventh Grade (Paperback)

This book was great I'm in seventh grade and can relate with evrything in the whole book! I would recommend it to anyone in the seventh grade or who has been in the seventh grade! I liked it so much I'm gona buy the sequal Jason and Marceline

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious, even for adults. Gave me flashbacks..., September 16, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Space Station Seventh Grade (Paperback)

I read this book 12 years ago (I'm 24 now), and I remember it to be one of the funniest, most original books I have ever read(and I HAVE read quite a few. I am now a grad student at Harvard!)I recently re-read this book, and still found it to be incredibly amusing, and it certainly reminded me of how life was back in the day. I recommend it to people of all ages, even adults. This book is just genius!

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Space Station Seventh Grade, May 21, 2001

By 

Robert W. Kalteux (Seminole, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Space Station Seventh Grade (Paperback)

Space Station Seventh Grade, by Jerry Spinelli, is a pretty realistic book about junior high school. It deals with some of the conflicts of growing up pretty well. The book begins with Jason, a kid entering the seventh grade. From the summer of sixth grade to the summer of seventh, this book accounts for most of the problems and issues Jason has with seventh grade and general life. It talks about the big things in middle school like girls, brothers, food, pimples, and friends. This book was my fifth by Jerry Spinelli, and I've read better and worse. I gave it 4 stars because it was a little weird being written 20 years ago. I reccomend it to middle schoolers and up.