Choose Moose

Sixth-grader Henry Haddock’s personal war with School Board Chairman “Scooter” McDuff starts innocently. Over breakfast one day, Henry complains that his favorite teacher has been laid off in a sudden, sneaky burst of budget cuts.

Henry goes to ask the School Board to ask why. Scooter tells Henry to shut up. A week later, Scooter does it again. After that, it’s a war of wills!

Henry’s protest eventually triggers a brawl in the high-school library, a recall petition, a battered TV reporter and the unlikely political career of high-school basketball star “Moose” Fulton, brother of Fantasia, Henry’s ferocious sidekick.

The town takes sides. Henry becomes the unlikely leader of the underdog faction—along with Moose and Fantasia, Charlie Mulcahy, Mr. McCloskey and the flamboyant Dexter D. Lee. Henry finds himself pitted versus the School Board, the “Thundering Three Hundred,” the local radio station, the richest man in town, his sister Penelope and a German shepherd named Wagner.

David Benjamin began his career as a storyteller in Mrs. Poss’ second-grade class at St. Mary’s School in Tomah, Wisconsin. His fictional memoir, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, originally published by Random House, was reprinted by Last Kid Books in 2019. His Last Kid Books include a collection of his essays, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought, two  short story anthologies, The Melting Grandmother and Other Short Works and Christmas in a Jugular Vein and sixteen novels, Three’s a Crowd, A Sunday Kind of Love, Summer of ’68, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter, Black Dragon, They Shot Kennedy, Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love, Witness to the Crucifixion, Choose Moose, Bistro Nights, The Voice of the Dog and Benjamin’s Jim Otis mystery series, Jailbait, Bastard’s Bluff, Woman Trouble, Dead Shot and Cheat. As a journalist, Benjamin has edited newspapers, published and edited several magazines, and authored SUMO: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport.

Since its launch in 2019, Benjamin’s publishing imprint, Last Kid Books, has won more than forty independent-press awards. These include, for They Shot Kennedy, the Midwest Book Awards’ 2021 grand prize for literary/historical/contemporary fiction, and a 2022 Silver Medal for Humor to Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love in the Independent Book Publishers Association’s prestigious Benjamin Franklin Awards.

Benjamin and his wife, Junko Yoshida, have been married for ages. They live sometimes in Madison, Wis., and the rest of the time in Paris.