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And while it wasn't a terrible book, it wasn't very good either. I picked up this book because it landed on so many good children's book lists.

I wouldn't let my kids read this book, much less play with someone like Bean.

At least they only killed some worms and not the frog they wanted to catch! Crawling under strangers' dressing rooms at the store? Climbing fences into other people's property? Stealing money? Digging mud holes in the lawn and tricking people into falling into them? Throwing a frigging bucket of live worms over someone in the house? Any one of these would have gotten us more punishment than Bean gets for all of them together - which I would guess is the appeal for children, the idea of doing all these mean things and basically getting rewarded in the end (since she makes a friend and gets a laughable token punishment of not watching videos for the week).Īnd I don't find any of the exploits funny except maybe Ivy pretending to be a witch, and that's been done better in earlier books. My siblings and I weren't angels by any means but we were nicer to each other and other children, politer, and better behaved in public than this spoiled little rotter. I had a lot more sympathy for Nancy the older sister and the "mean" neighbor than I did for Bean. I vastly prefer a child protagonist like Ramona who gets in trouble because of misunderstandings or poor judgment (in ways that are totally natural for a kid her age) rather than being deliberately bad.

I would have liked it better if Bean hadn't been such an obnoxious little brat. Cute friendship story about two different little girls learning to appreciate each.