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Junie B. Jones Is Captain Field Day by Barbara Park is a school story for 8 year olds about being handed a job you are nowhere near qualified for.
Junie B. wakes up shouting. It is Field Day. She shouts the news at the dog. Then she goes and shouts it at her baby brother, who is asleep in his cot, and who then screams his whole entire head off.
Her mother wants to know what has got into her. Field Day has got into her, Mother. Obviously.
She rings her best friend Grace to check she is not ill, gets Grace's dad instead and tells him there is something wrong with his voice. Then she tells Grace off for tooting her own horn, which is what Grampa Miller calls bragging. Grace points out that Junie B. is not exactly speedy herself. This does not go down well.
At school the captain is chosen by pulling folded paper out of a basket. Junie B. digs around in there for ages because her fingers have not touched the right paper yet. She is waiting for the right vives. Vibes, says her teacher. Whatever, says Junie B.
She gets it. She skips round in a circle. Nobody else claps.
And then, because captain means boss, she starts planning the leotard and the tights and the cape and the belt with lightning on it.
The comedy is that she is always completely certain and usually completely wrong, and she tells you everything either way. Her teacher is called Mrs. because Mrs. has another name too but Junie B. just likes Mrs. and that's all.
Do know that the narration is deliberately ungrammatical. Runned. Digged. Bestest. That's on purpose and it is a lot of the joke, but if you have a child who has just got the hang of past tenses, or one who reads everything aloud to you, you might want to be ready for it.
The other thing worth a mention is that there is a boy in the class called Meanie Jim who says unkind things, and Junie B. makes a fist at him and sucks in her cheeks at Grace. It is playground-level, and nobody gets hurt, but this is a narrator who says exactly what she thinks about people.
If your reader takes to a child with LOTS of opinions and no filter whatsoever, try Junie B. Jones and Her Big Fat Mouth, where she gets in trouble for shooting her mouth off and then tells the whole class she has the best job in the world without having the faintest idea what it is.
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