Miss Laney is Zany! by Dan Gutman

I'm continuing my research into currently popular children's fiction series.  Dan Gutman's My Weird School is among the most frequently requested by the elementary set.   This particular book had a silly straight-forward plot, some great wordplay, and kids who can get the better of adults.  After reading it, I'm not surprised it's popular, particularly among the boys.  The characters are all wacky, gripe about the usual school headaches and traumas, and they even get to say jerky things now and then.   I suspect that the books are formulaic (as is much of series fiction), but that can be helpful to new readers.  Anything that excites a new reader to pick up one book after another is fine by me.

Inky the Indigo Fairy, by Daisy Meadows.

 These books fly off the shelves at my library where they are waved about in joy by five and seven year old girls.  As a dutiful children's librarian I took it upon myself to figure out what kind of paper I'm peddling.

Ouch.  The content is even more vacuous than I feared.  I'm a couple decades too old, and have never been girly enough to handle this kind of sparkle.  I've listened to parents moan about how their intelligent little girls insist on being read these stories aloud.  Their greatest chagrin stems from same inane plot recurring in each and every book.

The positive spin on the series is that they motivate many new readers to persevere through 60+ pages of text on their own.  That's no small feat.