Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Ivy & Bean: Bound to Be Bad
Illustrator: Sophie Blackall
Fiction Series
For ages 6 to 9
Chronicle Books, 2008 ISBN: 978-0811862653
For some reason everything Bean does this morning goes wrong. Even though she knows she shouldn’t lick her breakfast plate, she does it anyway, which means she gets stuck doing the dishes. Bean’s big sister discovers that Bean took her pink yarn, which Bean then has to pay for. Then Bean is impertinent to her mother and it is decided that Bean better go outside before she gets into any more trouble.
Bean goes to see her friend Ivy, whom she discovers standing outside still as a statue with her arms in the air. Ivy explains that she is trying to attract wild animals to her person by “trying to be good.” Ivy wants to be like the man who “was so good that wild beasts talked to him and birds swarmed after him.”
The girls soon discover that their efforts to be good are not sufficient, which is when Ivy comes up with the bright idea that the best way to show off how good they are, is to be bad. The plan is that Bean will be really bad and then Ivy will reform her. The hope is that they will ooze so much goodness that they will attract “birds galore” to them. What happens instead is that Bean, Ivy, and the other children in the neighborhood go on a badness rampage.
In this fifth Ivy and Bean book, Annie Barrows takes her readers on a hilarious mini adventure that takes some very strange turns. Ivy and Bean discover that trying to be a modern day St. Francis of Assisi is not as easy as it seems.
