Attack of the Evil Elvises by Dan Greenburg

Attack of the Evil Elvises by Dan Greenburg

Greenburg, D. (2007). Attack of the Evil Elvises. New York, NY: Random House, Inc.

Science Fiction; Chapter Book

          This is an extremely cute story that gives kids background information about a historical entertainer in a humorous manner. In this book there are three good aliens who go on a trip to Las Vegas with their human friend. Once there they see a lot of Elvis impersonators. Their human friend describes that there is an Elvis Convention every year in Las Vegas in honor of the historical entertainer, Elvis Pressley. However, the aliens are not pleased with this answer, believing that the many Elvises are really bad aliens trying to take over planet Earth. The good aliens go through an incredible adventure, filled with humor, in order to save the world from the bad Elvis aliens.

The aliens that are on planet Earth are confused by many things, asking questions and making comments that many young children would say and ask about situations. To older students who are aware of these things, this story would be humorous, in the sense that the aliens are foreign to the planet. One strategy children work on in reading is using context clues to figure out the meaning of words they do not recognize. In this novel, there are several made up words that the aliens use, only to be figured out by the context of the sentences. For an example, the following sentences contain words made up:

“A leopard is just a big ketzenlongo….Their human shapes would begin to melt in less than an arp. They had less than twenty mynts to go.”

The word “ketzenlongo” means cat in the aliens’ language, and “arp” means hour while “mynts” means minutes, based off the context clues in the sentence. Students can use their context clues skill and strategy to figure out words like the ones the aliens were using. This would be a more fun and engaging way to get them unto using this strategy. 

Alien Voki