By Megan McDonald
Judy is dead certain her summer is ruined the day both her best friends leave town, so she turns the whole break into a wild adventure contest with her little brother.
School lets out and Judy Moody has the whole glorious summer planned, until it falls apart in one afternoon. Rocky's off to circus camp, Amy's flying to Borneo, and Judy is stuck at home convinced she is about to have the most boring summer in the history of summers. So she does the Judy thing: she invents a competition. She and her little brother Stink start racking up 'thrill points' for every brave, daring, or just plain ridiculous thing they can pull off, and the race to out-thrill each other turns a bummer summer into the opposite. It's small-scale and very funny, the kind of chaos that happens on your own street when a bored child decides to make something happen.
Judy talks the way a real child talks, in capital letters and big declarations, and that voice is the whole draw. The chapters are short, Peter Reynolds's scribbly drawings break up every few pages, and the plot is a simple, low-stakes contest a child can imagine running in their own backyard. It's the ideal summer read for a child who reads but needs a reason to keep going over the break, because the book is literally about beating boredom, and it's the tenth-or-so friend in a long series, so a child who clicks with Judy has a shelf waiting.