By Barbara Park
One box with Junie B. Jones's entire kindergarten year: a loud, opinionated five-year-old narrating her own school days in her own mixed-up words, and one of the funniest early-chapter series there is.
Junie B. is starting kindergarten and she has thoughts about every bit of it: the bus, the boys, a wedding, the nice teacher, and a meaner one she mostly invents in her head. She narrates the whole year herself, in her own funny, mixed-up grammar, forever getting into scrapes she makes worse before she makes them right. This box holds her entire kindergarten stretch, so a child who loves the first book has a long, laugh-out-loud pile of them waiting, all at the same easy reading level.
For a child just moving into chapter books who you'd love to see laughing, Junie B. is about as safe a bet as the shelf has. She's funny the way a five-year-old is actually funny: indignant, dramatic, dead sure she's right. Plenty of children see themselves in her and keep turning pages to find out what she'll blow up next. The chapters are short and the words are easy, and since the box carries her whole kindergarten year, one hooked child is set for months of bedtimes.