Ivy & Bean 4-6

Annie Barrows's Ivy & Bean 4-6 holds three Ivy and Bean stories in one book for 7 year olds, and the first two are both about going a bit too far.

What happens

In Bound to Be Bad, Ivy has seen a picture. A man with birds flying all round him and a wolf licking his foot. Her mum explained that he was so good that wild animals loved him.

So Ivy is standing in her back garden with her arms in the air, thinking nice thoughts about people and waiting for a bird to land on her fingers.

Bean joins in. Bean can manage nice thoughts about her mum and dad. Her older sister Nancy is harder.

Then they get a better idea. If you can turn a wolf good simply by being good enough at it, you could surely do the same to Crummy Matt, who is ten, enormous, and the meanest boy on the street.

The dialogue is why these books work. Two seven-year-olds building a whole theory out of half-understood grown-up information and then taking it completely seriously. Snow White comes up. Ivy is not impressed by Snow White. (Everyone knows you aren't supposed to eat things you get from strangers.)

In Take Care of the Babysitter, Bean's older sister Nancy is put in charge for an afternoon, and the girls set out to prove she should never be handed the job again. Doomed to Dance rounds off the set. They don't need reading in order, and having three in one book is a cheap way to find out whether Ivy and Bean are your reader's kind of people.

A scene to flag, though. Crummy Matt holds his pet rat up by the tail while the other children on the street tell him to stop, and the rat clearly hates it. It's there so you can see precisely how crummy Matt is, and Ivy marches straight over and tells him off. Still, a child who is soft about animals will mind that page. Ivy also describes a picture she's seen of a wolf that had been eating the townspeople, with arms and legs lying about in it.

What to read next

If they take to the pair of them, the first Ivy and Bean book is the one where Bean is quite sure the nice-looking girl over the road is going to be boring.