My Weird School: Ms. Hannah Is Bananas!

Dan Gutman's Ms. Hannah Is Bananas is a very silly school story for 8 year olds about a boy who has decided that art is the stupidest thing ever invented.

What happens

It's the fourth My Weird School book. A.J. is in second grade (an American school year, so roughly Year 3 here). He hates school, he REALLY hates Andrea Young, and now there's art with Ms. Hannah.

Ms. Hannah wears a dress sewn together out of pot holders. She doesn't own a bin. She sticks everybody's painty newspaper onto a giant ball that grows every lesson (A.J.'s used tissue included). Art is all around us, she says. A.J. is not convinced.

He does have an answer for everything, though. A blank sheet of paper? That's a white polar bear playing in the snow and eating vanilla ice cream. Nothing on his table? It's an invisible sculpture!

Along the way he stands on his friends' shoulders to spy into the teachers' lounge, sits on a sculpture worth millions at the museum and gets the fright of his life from a statue that moves. Then Ms. Hannah pairs him with Andrea for a friendship picture, and you can probably guess how that goes.

Reading it is like being stuck inside A.J.'s very loud head. Everything is the best or the worst "in the history of the world". Everybody laughs "even though I didn't say anything funny". It's short, the chapters fly by and the jokes land fast, which is great if your reader likes a quick win.

A.J. calls people "dumbhead" and says he hates Andrea quite a lot. It's all very cartoonish, and they give as good as they get, but if you'd rather skip that kind of name-calling it's good to know it's there.

What to read next

More A.J. and friends? Try It's Halloween, I'm Turning Green. It's Mischief Night, somebody has covered A.J.'s trees in toilet paper, and he's absolutely sure he knows who did it.