The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids (Volume 1) (original 1990; edition 2004)

A silly series that creates more questions than it answers. It's great for formulating theories as well as predictions. The class dynamics should be very familiar to those of the Magic School Bus generation. ( )

I think this book is a great book. It is very exciting and has so many adventures. It is about kids who get a new teacher because the old teacher is tired of taking care of the students. Could it be true that their new teacher is a vampire? ( )

(I now maintain a blog just for my kid-lit reviews. Find it at http://kidlit4adults.blogspot.com .)

A friend has convinced me to try my hand this year for the first time at writing children's literature; but I don't actually know anything about children's literature, so am starting the process among other ways by first reading a stack of popular books that have been recommended to me. Today's titles are from yet another of these series of endless chapter-books designed for grade-schoolers, in this case all of them co-penned by a duo of friends who used to be grade-school teachers themselves; this is one of the types of employment I myself am hoping to find in the industry, to kick out such easy-reading 30,000-word titles once a month or so, which is why I'm reading so many of them these days. Now, admittedly, this particular series is based on a high-concept that I find tough to imagine lasting for as long as it has; basically, each title features yet another new adult in the lives of our middle-class child heroes who may or may not be a mythological creature, exhibiting strange traits throughout the story but never just coming out and saying whether they're a mummy or vampire or whatever. (And in fact there are almost 75 books in this series now, nearly all of them featuring a different mythological creature, which just on its own is pretty impressive.) These are very much for the younger end of the chapter-book crowd, in my opinion from ages 7 to about 9 or 10, featuring lots of illustrations and a ton of silly humor; and to their credit Dadey and Jones are much more interested in simply being entertaining than in trying to teach a moral lesson, usually a common trait among books for this age group. They're nothing special, but certainly readable and fun, and come recommended for younger readers looking for their first dose of genre excitement but wanting to avoid dark material altogether. ( )

The Bailer School Kid series focuses on four children [Melody, Liza, Howie and Eddie]. Every book has the same basic plotline, the children suspect that an adult is not all that they appear to be. The children then go about trying to find proof and/or try to get rid of them. The books never say whether or not they were actually what the children thought they were, they are left open ended for the reader to determine what they thought.

This is a series of books that I highly enjoyed as a child and I still own the entire collection. Recently I started to reread them and fell in love with them all over again. ( )

This represents a Realistic Fiction book because it is true to life. The plot works together well and there are a variety of people present in the book. Eddie, the antagonist, continually tries to annoy the teacher. He is a round character because we continually find out more about his personality. He is revealed through his actions and thoughts. This is appropriate for the Intermediate level.