My Weird School Special: We’re Red, Weird, and Blue! What Can We Do?

Dan Gutman's We're Red, Weird, and Blue! What Can We Do? is a school-rivalry comedy for 8 year olds about a boy whose only presidential knowledge involves toilets.

A.J. hates February. He has four reasons and he lists them for you, and the worst one is Presidents' Day.

That's because of last year, when he worked for a million hundred hours on an oral report about Benjamin Franklin and then stood up in front of the whole class before anyone mentioned that Franklin was never president.

Now his school is up against Dirk School in the Presidents' Day Challenge, with a trip to DizzyLand for the winners, and he has been picked for the team alongside Andrea Young.

Andrea knows everything. Her parents hire tutors. She's going to Harvard.

A.J. knows that Millard Fillmore put the first flush toilet in the White House, and that George H. W. Bush once threw up on somebody. That's the entire list.

The joke, all the way through, is A.J. getting almost everything wrong and narrating it anyway. He explains that there was electricity in the air, then points out that if there was, everybody would have been electrocuted. He hears "this is going to be a cakewalk" and spends the rest of the night wondering why everyone keeps talking about cake. He sits in the all-porpoise room, which he thinks is a silly name because there aren't any dolphins in it.

He also refuses to tell you things. "I'm not gonna tell you. Okay, okay, I'll tell you." Your reader will pick that up and use it on you within a day.

Underneath the silliness there's a decent bit of feeling. A.J. is on that stage knowing he's the weak half of the team, hearing "If we lose, it will be all your fault, A.J." from the audience on his way in, and Andrea tells him so too. He's right. He is losing it for them.

Here's the honest thing. It's American presidents from start to finish. Raccoons in the White House, the shortest president, who was on the five thousand dollar bill. A British eight year old won't know one of those answers, and that turns out not to matter, because neither does A.J. and that's the whole point. The puzzle pages at the back assume rather more.

If they take to A.J. complaining about a holiday, It's Halloween, I'm turning green! is the same class on the sugariest night of the year, and it opens with somebody covering his trees in loo roll.