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Every Uncle Henry Book has the Uncle Henry Promise printed in the front. It takes up a full page, but the central premise is that “you will always have fun when you read it.” In fact, says Uncle Henry, sometimes “adults will laugh so hard they will fall on the floor and roll around clutching their stomach.” 

I road-tested “The Vile-Burgers,” the first Uncle Henry book, on my 7-year-old granddaughter Sophia, and I have to say frankly I didn’t do that, but it is indeed a very funny book—for an adult.  

The story involves a little girl from New York who sets off on a trek to Texas, accompanied by a peculiar group of ghouls who emerge from a Halloween pumpkin, to search for her “socialite archeologist” parents who disappeared on a quest for the lost Oiltec civilization. 

It’s told as a series of short takes, almost like a movie or TV script, with a sentence or two to set the scene followed by a few paragraphs of snappy dialogue. The snappy dialogue certainly made Grandma giggle, but Sophia was captured by the cliff-hanging plot turns. She didn’t really think it was funny—she took it seriously, and insisted on hearing scene after scene, so we got mostly through the book on the first reading.  

She was also able to read a lot of it herself, even though she’s not quite eight and the book is pitched for nine-year-olds. That’s the idea. Grandma reads until she wants to take a break, and then the kid is hooked and has to do some of the work herself to find out what happens. This is possible despite the inclusion of some fancy vocabulary, some but not all of which is defined in Appendix 1: “dastardly, adj. A really rotten thing to do is a dastardly act. Like when your little brother sneaks into your room at night in the dark and whilst you are sound asleep secretly ties one of your pant legs to the chair so when you get up late in the morning and need to rush out to catch the bus you can break your leg just trying to pull your pants on. That’s seriously dastardly.”  

Kids, of course, love fancy vocabulary, and will even sound words out if they must. The Uncle Henry series, funny as it is, has lots of well-disguised but serious educational goals based on the experience of Uncle Henry, in real life Hank Schwarz, once the president of a very successful L.A. advertising and marketing company. He’s spent the past few years working with inner city kids, reading to them at the local public library and as a volunteer art teacher in the 5th grade classroom of his wife Patricia in L.A.’s award-winning Solano Elementary School. Oh, and he draws all of the clever cartoon-like pictures for his books too. 

The Uncle Henry series is an interesting experiment in branding and packaging, clearly benefiting from Schwarz’s previous career. It’s being launched not as one book or even as a series, but as a publishing house, Uncle Henry Books, complete with Web site, which is in turn a division of Schwarz’s Prototype Entertainment Products. 

The books will be for sale initially on the Internet, and they will also be offered directly to schools and libraries. Traditional bookstore distribution may or may not follow.  

The series is definitely high-concept, as Schwarz explains in his tongue-in-cheek initial press release, which of course he wrote himself. He claims that his books are “(a) immensely funny” and “(b) completely orphan-free.” But also, “the other important aspect of Uncle Henry Books, which should be of interest to almost no one but a few humorless teachers and librarians, is that the idea was born as we watched the development of young children in school in the inner city over the years. 

We saw all the best educational practices in teaching and reading techniques that were possible to maximize literacy development at an early age like 8 or 10—even among the children of immigrants with no prior English experience. A typical classroom of 26 children might have seven to nine home languages. But the way they could read after only a few years, right up there with native speakers—that really caught our attention.”  

So there’s definitely a mission behind the madness in Uncle Henry books. Hank and Pat Schwarz have tried to capture all they’ve learned about teaching kids, and have put it in a peppy format which should successfully compete with television in capturing the imagination of young readers. 

The Web site, according to the release, will have “ a very serious Teacher Center with extensive notes on literacy development theory, strategies for reading development imbedded in Uncle Henry books, lesson plans, and further site references.” Not too serious, of course.“We still have our doubts,” said Uncle Henry, frowning, “about homework.” 

I’ve also read, but not road-tested, one of the other books which will be on sale Oct. 1, “How The Tooth Fairy, of All People, Saved the Day,” which is aimed at the 7 and up age group. It’s funny too, and similarly challenging.  

All I know about the third book is in Uncle Henry’s press release, and therefore may or may not be for real: “For the older, age 10 and up crowd including grad students who should probably be studying for their information science or organic chemistry finals instead, there’s the deceptively simple but intelligent sci-fi story “Biode.”  

“What would happen if an ordinary kid somehow created a heuristic artificial intelligence but then couldn’t tell anyone he had it? What would happen if you could ask it to do anything you wanted and no one knew about it? And what would happen if the one instruction you gave it was to learn everything about everything in the world, and it did?”  

Is Uncle Henry serious here? This seems a bit heavy for the average 10-year-old. And of course Uncle Henry is almost never completely serious about anything, so we’ll just have to wait and see what the book is about when it’s out, promised with the other two for Oct. 1.