A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever by Marla Frazee

The result is just realistic enough to be perfect, a grade-schooler's idyllic summer with limited demands for learning and bettering and a whole lot of reveling in kid priorities. This sweetly captures the pleasures of youthful time-wasting in the company of your best friend with a keen understanding that those pleasures are best when they're unsentimental.

Add in some snarky and boisterous grade-school humor, and you've got A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever. Truly stellar summer books, such as Lynne Rae Perkins' Pictures from Our Vacation can evoke the weirdness and unexpected magic of summer's free-form experiences even in the darkest season.

(starred review), 'Summer can seem a long time away during the colder portions of the year, and summer books can hold a special promise and poignancy in the long run-up until the months of freedom. This intergenerational story will elicit howls of laughter and requests for repeated readings. (Mar.*Frazee brings out the typical energy of a couple of boys who may scoff at nature and seem to prefer watching TV, but it is through her artful illustrations that readers catch glimpses of just how savvy and creative these kids can be. , Frazee's story celebrates casual extended-family affection, with a knowing wink at the friends' dismissal of their elders' best-laid plans. Frazee's narrative resembles a tongue-in-cheek travel journal, with plenty of enticing pencil and gouache illustrations of the characters knocking about the shoreline. Bill tries to interest the boys in a museum exhibit on penguins the inseparable friends (“To save time, Bill began calling them Jamon”) show no enthusiasm yet energetically build “penguins” from mussel shells. On the way home, the boys reported their findings”) and voice-bubble exchanges between the boys (Eamon, training the lenses on James: “His freckles are huge. Eamon's friend James joins the sleepover, and although the text describes James as “very sad” when his mother drives away, a cartoon shows him exuberantly waving “Bye!” Humorous contradictions arise between the hand-lettered account (“Bill handed them each a pair of binoculars and a list of birds to look for.

) salutes grandparents and slyly notes children's diversions in this breezy tale of “the best week ever.” After Eamon enrolls in nature camp, he spends nights with his grandparents, Bill and Pam, at their beach cottage.

A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever by Marla Frazee