Annie Barrows

Everyone in second grade seems set on breaking a world record and friends Ivy and Bean are no exception, deciding to become the youngest people ever to discover a dinosaur skeleton.

When seven-year-old Bean plays a mean trick on her sister, she finds unexpected support for her antics from Ivy, the new neighbor, who is less boring than Bean first suspected.

Second-grade best friends Ivy and Bean beg for ballet lessons, then, when they are cast as squids in their first recital, scheme to find a way out of what seems to be boring, hard, and potentially embarrassing.

Bean's older sister, Nancy, is going to Girl Power 4-Ever Camp, where she will do Crafts and Music and First Aid and other secret things that Bean will never know about because girls have to be eleven to go to Girl Power 4-Ever Camp. Bean doesn't care. She doesn't want to go to camp. She wouldn't go even if they begged her. So ha. So ha ha. So-wait a second! Bean and Ivy can make their own camp, their own better camp: Camp Flaming Arrow, where counselors...

When all the second grade students must enter the science fair, which has global warming as its theme, best friends Ivy and Bean team up to create an unusual project.

As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton discovers her next subject in a book club on Guernsey--a club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.