This was one of my favorite books when I was in school. Bruce Coville wrote a lot of my favorites from that time period

I still have my copy. Love Coville's books.

Also he's really responsive on social media and a super nice guy if you ever want to say hello.

Oh, one other thing: If you love Coville, you should read some Henry Neff. Another fantastic author and super nice person.

Omg I loved this book and a bunch of others by this author! Gotta see if they sell DRM free epubs somewhere so my kids can enjoy them.

What a pleasant blast from the past. Thanks OP!

I really enjoyed My Teacher Flunked The Planet. I've got to go reread it. I feel like it might be topical.

Holy cow, I would never have thought of this book without something triggering the memory, but it was a great one! I think it was one of the books my teacher kept on the shelf for if you were done with classwork, and I blew through it in class.

In the second book, I Left My Sneakers In Dimension X, there's a line from Snout that has roughly stuck with me all my life and influenced my philosophy on the world.

"Take of solace when solace is offered. The cup of pain cannot always be shared."

Between that and the discussion between Splinter & Raph in TMNT 1990, there was a lot to unpack there while I was coping with anger issues as a kid.

Maybe someone should have taught their teacher not to pull off his human mask while standing right in front of an open window.

I loved these books as a kid. One of them had a line in it that really stuck with me:

"When technology advances, the technology to fool it advances too. There's a nice balance in that, don't you think?"

Thank you for bringing this memory back! Absolute banger art and book!

I remember when books like these were offered on portable red, blue, and yellow shelves. Talking about the Scholastic book faires that would come to school in the 1980s. I don't remember what the colours represented, but I remember the colours clearly and I don't recall any green, purple, pink, black, white, or orange shelves, just those three colours, so I imagine they meant something. But I looked at everything.

I think I also got "The House With a Clock in its Walls," the cat vampire one, the vegetable vampire one (I forget the names), "Tom's Midnight Garden", and other school-friendly/age appropriate YA horror, before I discovered Stephen King and Dean Koontz. (And then I never looked at YA again, until the Harry Potter books started coming out. I'm still reading Sword Art Online, which is YA from Japan; they call it LN, or Light Novels, over there, but, same thing.)

i tried reading this to my kid and it scared the fuck outta them lmao

Reeeeeally looks like 1980s Trump. Release the UFO files!

Reminds me of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Oh my god I forgot about this! What an absolute banger!

I remember coming across this in the elementary school library! Thanks for the quick nostalgia trip.

That was a good book

I thought he was stabbing himself in the neck with a large parsnip until I zoomed in.

There was a really decent point and click adventure game about this series. It had a bunch of methods for discovering the alien, and it was randomised which teacher was the alien each run. A touch clunky on some sections, but still a personal favourite of mine.

I used to love these books in fourth and fifth grade. I could read one in about a Thursday/Friday before the weekend, which I had to do and then write an essay on in order to get my super Nintendo controller back. There were so many of these and they were kind of dumb but they took place in our real world which made it feel like a more plausible fantasy.