Boy, 9, Dispenses Advice

Alex Greven discussing his book on
The Ellen Degeneres Show earlier
this year. Alec Greven makes it look like child’s play. In the span of a year, the nine-year-old author has gone from self-published book fair bestseller to national media darling, and has three books arriving between now and next May. This month HarperCollins’s Collins imprint will release the first, How to Talk to Girls, based on a book Greven wrote at the age of eight, for a school assignment. 

In the picture book, which features interior art by Kei Acedera (her first children’s book as well), Greven, a fourth-grader from Castle Rock, Colo., offers suggestions about dealing with girls and crushes (“It is good to give a girl compliments. Don’t go crazy with them though. Then you look like you are trying too hard”), as well as observational “statistics” based on his experiences at school (“About 73 percent of regular girls ditch boys; 98 percent of pretty girls ditch boys”).  
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