Synopsis: Best friends Ivy and Bean are back and looking for adventure in the second installment of this engaging new series. This time they’ve made an amazing discoverya ghost in the school bathroom! Ivy and Bean can see its cloudy form and its glowing eyes. They can hear its moaning voice. This is the best thing that ever happened at schooluntil the teachers find out. Now Ivy and Bean have to figure out how to get the ghost out of the bathroom. Will they succeed? Maybe. Will they have fun? Of course!
Release Date: 5th July 2007
Genres: Middle Grade, Friendship, Imagination, Magic, Humour, Contemporary, Children’s Books, Ghosts, Paranormal.
Pages: 122
Review: Ivy spots a ghostly shadow and cold patches coming out from the girls bathroom at school and soon the whole lot of kids on their playground know all about the scary ghost haunting the school. With her imagination running wild she decided to create a potion to get rid of it, but it comes with extra trouble.
This one showed Ivy with the really bad behaviour in this one, though she meant it in no harm really she still did, she caused property damage and didn’t confess to it, she scared all the children at the school and distracted them from what they were supposed to be doing and got herself into trouble.
Bean was just as rotten in this one but as we were at school she only did a few things to be a bully this time, mostly as she wasn’t around her sister a lot. I was hoping for a little progress in her bad behaviour to be turning good as she had Ivy around her but it seems that she won’t get better at all.
I liked that we got a glimpse at their school life, what they are like in the classroom and what the others in the class were like and their relationships with them. And their teachers too and how they reacted and were spoken to by each of them.
The storyline of this one was a little more interesting than the first one due to their imaginations being in overdrive. Though one thing that I would have liked to have known what it was they saw in the bathroom, some sort of logical reasoning that a teach could have helped explain to them after the fact but oh well.
This was better than the first book but not by much at all and it still has such bad behaviour of the lead children that I know this series would put a lot of parents off from letting their kids read them.
About Author: Annie grew up in Northern California, and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, with a degree in Medieval History. Unable to find a job in the middle ages, she decided upon a career as an editor, eventually landing at Chronicle Books in San Francisco, where she was in charge of “all the books that nobody in their right mind would publish.” After earning an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Mills College, Annie wrote (as Ann Fiery) a number of books for grown-ups about such diverse subjects as fortune-telling (she can read palms!), urban legends (there are no alligators in the sewer!), and opera (she knows what they’re singing about!). In 2003, Annie grew weary of grown-ups, and began to write for kids, which she found to be way more fun
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