I am Not Joey Pigza

“I’m a brand-new man with a brand-new plan.”

Joey Pigza is knocked for a loop when his good-for-nothing dad shows up on his doorstep as a recycled person. After a lucky lotto win, Carter Pigza truly believes he’s somebody else. He’s even renamed himself Charles Heinz–and he insists that Joey and his mother join his happy Heinz family plan.

“My head felt like it was full of bees, and they were busy in ways that were bad for me.”

Joey has little choice but to embrace a head-spinning series of changes, which include having to leave school to help out at the beat-up roadside diner his dad has purchased. But Joey is afraid that in going with the flow he will go over the falls and end up in a place far away from who he really is.

In this seriously comic new novel, Jack Gantos pushes his acclaimed hero into entirely new territory, where he wrestles with issues of identity and forgiveness, and teaches himself how to triple-flip a turkey burger while shouting out his new favorite phrase . . .

“Do you want fries with that?”