Amelia Bedelia Shapes Up

Herman Parish's Amelia Bedelia Shapes Up is a funny school story for 6 year olds, and it opens with our heroine being picked for a team after a drinking fountain.

What happens

It happens at break. Two captains take turns choosing teams. Everybody gets chosen except Amelia Bedelia, and when it is Dawn's turn she says she will have the water fountain instead.

That one stings. Amelia Bedelia goes home red in the face and then lies awake listening to her parents whisper about coordination and self-confidence and sports camp.

So she creeps to the top of the stairs to hear better and gets her head stuck between the spindles. Which is very Amelia Bedelia.

The joke of these books is that she takes every single word at its word. Her dad tells her to address the ball, so she bends down and says hello to it politely. He asks for an iron and she tells him his shirt looks fine. When the coach announces that the class needs conditioning, Amelia Bedelia thinks everyone's hair looks lovely as it is.

Your reader will be a step ahead of her nearly every time, and that is the fun of it. They get to know what the grown-ups mean and watch her cheerfully not know.

There is a school pentathlon coming up too, five events borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Amelia Bedelia has never thrown a discus in her life. Her mother's cake pans do not survive the practice.

One thing to flag. This is a very American book and it does not pretend otherwise. There is kickball at break, a whole chapter of televised football with quarterbacks and referees, and a running course measured in feet. None of it will stop a reader, but be ready for questions.

What lifts it above the wordplay is how the sports actually go. She comes second in the discus. Second in the javelin. Second in the long jump. And she is quite pleased about it. She decides she has a runner-up reputation to keep up!

There is also a moment where a boy tells her she throws like a girl. She goes scarlet, tells him she throws like a girl because she IS a girl, and walks off. It is over in a few lines and it is very satisfying.

Amelia Bedelia has clearly been getting into scrapes for a while before this one. She mentions a run-in with a policeman over a flower bed and leaves it at that, so your reader can jump in here without missing anything.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Amelia Bedelia Digs In takes her off to the beach with her friend Alice and a cousin who is thoroughly convinced he is a pirate. Same literal-minded girl, more grown-ups saying things she can happily get wrong.