Ivy & Bean

Annie Barrows's Ivy & Bean is a story for 7 year olds about two girls who were both quite sure they'd never be friends.

What happens

Bean's mum keeps suggesting she goes and plays with the new girl over the road. Bean won't. Ivy sits neatly on her front steps in a dress, reading a big book, with a sparkly headband that actually stays on. Bean climbs things and falls out of them. As far as Bean's concerned, nice is just another word for boring.

What changes her mind is a trick going wrong.

Bean tapes a long thread to a twenty dollar note out of her big sister Nancy's purse, lays it on the pavement and climbs into a bush to wait. Nancy bends down, Bean yanks the thread, Nancy loses her mind. It's a good plan. The trouble is Nancy takes an age coming home.

So Bean sits in the bush getting scratched and itchy, watching Ivy across the road, until she can't bear it any longer and shouts over to ask what the gold stick's for. Then she pretends to be a ghost. Then Nancy turns up, spots the money and the thread, and starts marching her indoors to their mother.

Bean runs. Ivy says one word from her porch. "Hide."

Ivy, it turns out, is training to be a witch. She's got a spell book nearly a hundred years old, given to her by an aunt who says she isn't one, a black robe covered in stars that keep peeling off, and twenty-four colours of face paint. She's been at it entirely on her own and has never once had anybody to show.

The pair of them are very funny together. Ivy looks like a pushover and doesn't talk like one for a second. Bean's got all the nerve and none of the patience. Between them they end up needing worms, which means digging in the one garden Bean's currently hiding from.

This is where they meet, so it's the right place to start.

Small thing for a British reader. It's dollars rather than pounds and there's the odd American school word, and none of it slows anything down, but your seven year old may well stop and ask.

What to read next

If they take to this pair, the Ghost That Had to Go is next. There's something moaning in the girls' toilets at school and Ivy can see its eyes.