Roscoe Riley Rules 2 – Never Swipe a Bully’s Bear

Katherine Applegate's Never Swipe a Bully's Bear is a funny story for 6 year olds told entirely from the time-out corner.

What happens

Roscoe Riley is in trouble again. He tells you so on the first page, then admits which rule he broke this time. Number 214. Do not kidnap your classmate's teddy bear. And do not hide him in the dirty clothes basket.

He would like you to know he really, truly did not mean to. There are just so many rules.

Then he backs up and tells you the whole thing.

It starts with Hamilton, who is a stuffed pig and has been Roscoe's best friend since his first birthday. Hamilton travels to school every day in the bottom of the backpack with the zip left open a bit, so he can breathe. Roscoe's big brother Max says first graders do not take stuffed animals to school and that he personally would be humiliated. Their mum takes Roscoe's side.

And then Hamilton is not in the backpack.

The search is the best bit and the worst bit. Under the couch. In the laundry. In the bathtub, just in case. The dog joins in and brings back a slobbery tennis ball and a chewed Lincoln Log. Roscoe's little sister Hazel offers to lend him her favourite Barbie for the night, an astronaut in a doctor's coat and sparkly high heels, and he hands her back because he can tell Hazel would miss her.

Then he lies in the dark under his glow-in-the-dark planets, thinking about the empty space next to him and about Pluto.

The chapters are tiny. Some are three lines long. One of them exists purely so Roscoe can tell you that Hamilton does NOT wear dresses. A reader who is just getting going on their own will turn pages fast here and feel very pleased about it.

Roscoe himself is the reason it works. He is not naughty. He is a boy who arrives at a completely reasonable plan by a completely unreasonable route, tells you every step, and is genuinely surprised at the end of it.

One small thing to weigh. The whole engine of this book is a child who cannot sleep without a particular toy and then loses it. If your reader has a Hamilton of their own, they will feel that properly. Some children find it comforting to see it happen to somebody else. Some will want the toy in their hand while they read.

This is the second Roscoe Riley book, though nothing in it depends on the first.

What to read next

Never Glue Your Friends to Chairs is where the corner started, if your reader wants the first one. That time the rule involved a tube his mum calls the don't-you-dare glue, an entire class who would not sit still, and a teacher whose job Roscoe was convinced he had to save.