By Joanna Cole
Ms. Frizzle drives the class through the whole solar system, gets herself stranded in the asteroid belt, and leaves the children to find their own way home.
The class is studying the solar system, and Arnold's cousin Janet is visiting and is insufferable about how much she already knows. The trip to the planetarium falls through because it's closed for repairs, so Ms. Frizzle presses a button and the bus becomes a rocket. They tour the moon, the sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars, and then an asteroid takes out a taillight. Ms. Frizzle goes outside to look, her line breaks, and she is gone. The children carry on past the outer planets without her, and it's Janet, reading the Friz's own book, who finds the autopilot instructions and flies them back to pick her up.
Every page is three books at once: a straight sentence of story, a crowd of speech bubbles, and a taped-up school report on the side about one planet. Your child chooses which layer to read, and a child who won't touch a fact book will read all three because they're chasing the joke. It's also the one book on this shelf with a plot, so it works when your child wants space but won't sit through a reference book. Janet is the secret of it, too: she's the child who knows everything and is unbearable, and she's the one who saves them.