By Jacqueline Davies
A brother and a sister spend the last week of summer trying to out-sell each other at lemonade, until the game turns real.
Evan Treski is furious. His little sister Jessie is skipping a grade and landing in his fourth-grade class, and she's better at math than he is, and now everyone will know it. So he starts a lemonade stand to prove he's good at something. Jessie, hurt and left out, starts her own stand right back. They shake on a deal: whoever makes a hundred dollars first by the end of summer takes the other one's money. Then the war gets out of hand, spying, sabotage, real money on the line, until two children who love each other have to figure out how to stop.
This is a natural step up from the shortest chapter books: a little more text on the page, a real plot that runs the whole way through, but a story so easy to fall into that the length never shows. Every child with a brother or sister knows exactly what it feels like to want to win against them and love them at the same time, and that's the whole book. It also teaches a bit of business and math without ever feeling like a lesson, because your child is too busy waiting to see who cracks first. It's a good bridge for a reader who's ready to leave the shortest books behind but isn't quite ready for something heavy.