Oddballs is not a straightforward autobigraphical narrative of the events of one's life while growing up, but rather a sequence of episodes strung together like beads on a necklace. Sleator constructs the book out of sharply drawn vignettes that epitomize different stages of his youth from around ten through high school. It is very much aimed at the same young adult audience for which his novels are intended, focusing as it does on the essentials of growing up and on those aspects of his youth that made Sleator the author he has become.

Sleator's novels are often funny, and in Oddballs his sense of humor ranges widely, showing how the weird inventions of his imagination in such novels as The Night the Heads Came may have their analogues in everyday life. In fact, part of the effect of reading Oddballs is to encourage one to look...