Ten Thousand Stories: An Ever-Changing Tale of Tragic Happenings

by Matthew Swanson, Robbi Behr (Illustrator)

A new story unfolds with every turn of a flap in this playful jigsaw puzzle of a book. Every page is divided into four turnable mini-pages that mix and match to create 10,000 different story combinations, each with its own quirky watercolor illustration. Some stories make sense, some come out downright surreal, and each one is as irreverently imaginative as the next. When will Michael find true love? What was it that pushed Elmo over the edge? Ten Thousand Stories lets the reader piece together each hilarious, gripping, or tragic tale. Part Exquisite Corpse and part Choose Your Own Disaster, this offbeat treasure is an addictive pleasure to play alone or to share.

32 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 2013

About the author

Matthew Swanson (and his wife Robbi Behr) are author and illustrator of the critically acclaimed Cookie Chronicles series, The Real McCoys trilogy, and the picture books Sunrise Summer, Babies Ruin Everything, and Everywhere, Wonder. When not advocating for local schools, giving talks on creative entrepreneurship, or running a summer salmon fishing operation on the Alaskan tundra, we live in an old barn on the Eastern Shore of Maryland—making books and raising our four kids.

Matthew and Robbi will spend the 2022-2023 school year crisscrossing the United States in a school bus/tiny home with our four kids, visiting underserved elementary schools in all 50 states (plus DC), and giving away 25,000 free hardcover books to students and teachers from low-income communities. To learn more about the Busload of Books tour, go to: www.busloadofbooks.com.

Reviews

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an odd book, not at all what I expected when I ordered it. It's basically like those books made for kids where each cardstock page is divided into a few pieces, and you can flip the pieces to tell different stories about aliens or monsters or whatever. Except this book, written and illustrated by a husband-wife team, is definitely not made for kids in mind. The stories, as the title suggests, are all tragic in a boring-adult-life sort of way, and the illustrations (and the stories) are not particularly child-friendly. When I flipped through the page to reveal mis-matched illustrations and stories, the stories did not make much sense and the illustrations entered an even more odd sense of the bizarre than they were as planned. And, while this was a book that was picked up by a real publisher rather than self-published, as the introduction states, I can't help but wonder: who exactly is the intended audience for this book? It's not kids, with a picture of a woman in negligee in one of the stories, and with the mismatched stories implying all kinds of naughty or confusing things. It's clever as a nostalgic experience for adults - like the adult versions of choose-your-own-adventure books - but it inspires even less entertainment than I expected. Disappointed.

[Kest Schwartzman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fun bit of fluff- both the stories and the illustrations.

[Gloria · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the stories witty and funny; not so the illustrations, which were more macabre than j enjoy. All in all, an entertaining book.

[Paul Boudreau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very creative project!