Happy Campers! Ivy and Bean Make the Rules by Annie Barrow

 

Five million girls in Girl Power 4-Ever shirts were squirming around the Youth Center, waiting for camp to begin. They hugged each other and squealed. They showed each other their cell phones. They sang. They danced. They giggled.

They were all bouncy and happy and busy. School's on break and it's time for "enrichment" camps. At least it is for Bean's sister Nancy. Nancy, pony tail with sparkly scrunchie swinging, was out of the car and joining the crowd of eleven to fourteen-year-olds in those special T-shirts, and for seven-year-old Bean, it's "Puppet Fun" or nothing for her "enrichment experience."

Not cool, thinks Bean.  She's going to build a tree house.

But Bean's duct tape and board tree house turns out to be a serious disappointment. Just then Ivy appears with another idea. With her mom's old curtains they make a tent on a limb of a tree in Monkey Park, anchor it with rocks, and plan their own "Camp Flaming Arrow." With the flyer from Nancy's camp, they study the list of possible activities:

A WEEK OF INSPIRATION AND FUN!
CRAFTS

NATURE STUDY

STRENGTH TRAINING

DRAMA

FIRST AID

DANCE

SOCIAL SKILLS

GREAT WOMEN OF HISTORY

Ivy and Bean begin with making friendship bracelets, but Bean's knots get all tangled up and they wind up with Ivy's hand tied together to one foot. A couple of little kids, Harley and Franny, come by and ask to join them, since their aunt has told them stay outside until dinner time. When Bean finally gets Ivy untangled, they all move on to Nature Study, with a lesson on Komodo Dragons. Ivy brings her Komodo catcher (a butterfly net) and they go on a Komodo hunt, which attracts two soccer camp boys, Leo and Juanito, who take komodo catching seriously. They're back the next morning for more Camp Flaming Arrow, where Bean decides to move on to Dance. She pushed thumbtacks into the bottoms of her shoes and tap dances on her mom's giant washtub.

RappityTappity Rappa Tappa Tap! Tap! Tap!! The noise is astounding.

Dogs barked. Cars slowed. The other campers stopped to look.

The next morning Ivy and Bean find their tent full of new campers, and their First Aid activity, aided with realistic red paint and more cut-up-curtain bandages, quickly turns into a Zombie Chase all around Monkey Park, where Camp Flaming Arrow picks up several new followers from the Puppet Fun pavilion.

By four o'clock in the afternoon, Monkey Park has a real Zombie Problem!

By Friday morning, Camp Flaming Arrow is the most popular activity at Monkey Park, and after Ivy's impassioned reading from Daredevils in Dresses; Heroines of History in which the Briton Queen Boudicca routs the invading Romans, nobody wants to be a Roman. Ivy, as Boudicca, declares that the trash in the park can be the Romans and grabbing assorted sticks for spears, the Camp Flaming Arrow campers cover themselves with glory, right down to the spouting fountain where the last Roman coffee cups take refuge and are vanquished to the trash container.  

Camp Flaming Arrow is a roaring success, in author Annie Barrow's and artist Sophie Blackall's Ivy and Bean Make the Rules: Book 9 in which Bean and Ivy's camp turns out to be way more fun than Girl Power 4-Ever, which big sister Nancy proclaims is "too much like school." For newly independent readers, this popular series is perfect, with short chapters and plenty of action appeal for young middle readers. Horn Book's reviewer says that this one "will leave their devoted fans very happy campers!"

Abducted by Aliens! Bad Guys (Alien VS Bad Guys) by Aaron Blabey

WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!

How? HE'S AN ALIEN!

Marmalade ISN'T a mad scientist who tried to destroy the world. He's an enormous hostile alien life-form....

And we're trapped inside its space station on the moon WITHOUT A ROCKET.

Yes, the Bad Guys gang are not in the best of positions, vis a vis, er, staying alive! Actually, they're somewhere in outer space in a capsule....

Are they doomed?

But little Legs has a plan. There is an escape pod, and all he has to do is decipher a bunch of unknown languages, punch in the right coordinates, and ....

FIGURE IT OUT!

But along the way they have to deal with the deadly ...

KDJFLOERHGCOINWERUHCGLEIRWFHEKLWJFHXALHW?!

But then little Legs pulls it off! He figures out the code to the escape pod and they blast off back to earth. But things on earth don't look right. Where are they?

OOPS. Could Legs have set the correct coordinates for Earth, but... sent them back to

65 MILLION BC?

It's a total celebration of the joy of reading (and of super silliness) in Aaron Blabey's The Bad Guys in Alien vs Bad Guys (The Bad Guys 6), the latest installment in the ditsy, screwy, and altogether ludicrous adventures in the author's goofy series. Not since the first Captain Underpants books have beginning chapter readers had such an occasion for the appreciation of the absurd, with this series of graphic novels illustrated by the author. Aaron Blabey is also the author-illustrator of the wonderfully zany picture book series which begins with Pig the Pug (see reviews here).