Junie B. Jones and Her Big Fat Mouth

Junie B. Jones and Her Big Fat Mouth by Barbara Park is a school story for 8 year olds narrated by a kindergartner who says every single thing she thinks.

What happens

Junie B. is in Room Nine. Room Nine has rules. No shouting. No running in the hall. No butting the other children in the stomach with your head.

She breaks all three in the first few pages.

Her teacher announces that next Monday will be Job Day, when everybody comes to school dressed as the job they want when they grow up. Junie B. does not know what she wants to be. Then a boy called Jim tells her she cannot be three jobs at once, and she shouts back that she can, that it is one special job where you paint and you unlock stuff and you save people, and that it is the bestest job in the whole wide world.

She has absolutely no idea what that job is. She has until Monday to find out.

This is one to hand over if your reader likes a narrator with LOTS of opinions. Junie B. tells you about the drool on the table when she thinks about jelly doughnuts. She tells you the policeman's helmet covered her whole entire eyes so she made a joke about the lights going out. She tells you Lucille is her bestest friend and also that she hates her, roughly one page apart, and both are completely true at the time.

Two things a parent might want to know. First, the whole book is written in Junie B.'s grammar. Runned. Hided. Bestest. That is the joke and it never lets up, so if wonky English in print bothers you, this will bother you. Second, she is quite rude. She calls a boy a big fat Jim, threatens him with a knuckle sandwich, and gets put on punishment for it more than once, which is the bit the book is actually about.

She also gets told off, properly, by both her teacher and the caretaker, and she does not always learn the lesson. It is a book about a small child with a big mouth rather than a book about a small child improving.

It is very American. Kindergarten, cops, Life Savers, Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.

What to read next

There is an earlier one worth going back for. In the Stupid Smelly Bus book she is almost six, it is her first day, and she is so frightened of the bus home that she decides not to get on it.