Ivy & Bean Bound to Be Bad

Annie Barrows's Ivy & Bean Bound to Be Bad is a funny friendship story for 7 year olds about two girls trying very hard to be good, and finding being bad much more fun.

What happens

Bean's morning goes wrong fast. She licks syrup off her plate (a magnetic force made her do it). She owes her sister Nancy seven dollars for some pink yarn. Then she tells her mum she'll only help if she's paid.

By the time she's sent outside to play, Bean is wondering something quite big. What if she really is a pain in the kazoo? What if she's worse than everyone else in the world?

Ivy, meanwhile, is standing in her back garden with her arms in the air, smiling so hard her eyes bulge. She's seen a picture of a man who was so good that birds flew round him and a wolf licked his foot. If she's pure enough of heart, a bird might land on her fingers.

Bean joins in. Nice thoughts about Mum and Dad? Easy. Nice thoughts about Nancy? That's where it falls apart.

So the pair of them aim higher. They'll turn Crummy Matt good. He's ten, he's enormous, and he's the meanest kid on Pancake Court.

That goes about as well as you'd expect. So Ivy has a new idea. Bean will be bad, really bad, and Ivy will reform her in front of everyone. It's like a play for the birds!

What follows is the funniest bit. Bean has to work out what being bad even is. She whispers a terrible word in Ivy's ear, gets told off for it, then shouts the most daring word she's prepared to say out loud. It's "BRA!" Before long, badness is spreading round the whole street.

Barrows is so good at how seven-year-olds really think. They take half a grown-up idea and run with it completely seriously. Ivy decides Snow White wasn't good at all, just a goonball who ate food from a stranger.

One scene to flag. Crummy Matt dangles his pet rat by the tail while the other children beg him to stop, and later he has Bean and Ivy tied to a tree with a rope. Nobody gets hurt, and it reads as pure mischief, but a child who's soft about animals might mind the rat.

What to read next

It's the fifth Ivy and Bean book. If your reader is hooked, the next one is Doomed to Dance, where the two of them talk their mums into ballet lessons and discover they've made a terrible mistake.