A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever
A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever
* “Frazee (Roller Coaster) salutes grandparents and slyly notes children’’s diversions in this breezy tale of “the best week ever.” After Eamon enrolls in nature camp, he spends nights with his grandparents, Bill and Pam, at their beach cottage. Eamon’’s friend James joins the sleepover, and although the text describes James as “very sad” when his mother drives away, a cartoon shows him exuberantly waving “Bye!” Humorous contradictions arise between the hand-lettered account (”Bill handed them each a pair of binoculars and a list of birds to look for. On the way home, the boys reported their findings”) and voice-bubble exchanges between the boys (Eamon, training the lenses on James: “His freckles are huge.” James: “Yeah, and his tongue is gross”). Bill tries to interest the boys in a museum exhibit on penguins; the inseparable friends (”To save time, Bill began calling them Jamon”) show no enthusiasm yet energetically build “penguins” from mussel shells. Frazee’’s narrative resembles a tongue-in-cheek travel journal, with plenty of enticing pencil and gouache illustrations of the characters knocking about the shoreline. Like The Hello Goodbye Window, Frazee’’s story celebrates casual extended-family affection, with a knowing wink at the friends” dismissal of their elders” best-laid plans.” (starred review) (Publishers Weekly 20080301)
* “Frazee’s hilarious round-headed cartoons romp across the page in snort-inducing counterpoint, abetted by the occasional speech balloon. . . . The genius here is not that the boys finally get outside in the end; it’s that their joy in being together is celebrated equally whether they’re annihilating each other in a video game or building a replica of Antarctica on Bill and Pam’s dock. As respectful of kid sensibilities and priorities as it’s possible for an adult to achieve.” (starred review) (Kirkus Reviews 20080301)
* “Summer can seem a long time away during the colder portions of the year, and summer books can hold a special promise and poignancy in the long run-up until the months of freedom. Truly stellar summer books, such as Lynne Rae Perkins’ Pictures from Our Vacation can evoke the weirdness and unexpected magic of summer’s free-form experiences even in the darkest season. Add in some snarky and boisterous grade-school humor, and you’ve got A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever. . . . This sweetly captures the pleasures of youthful time-wasting in the company of your best friend with a keen understanding that those pleasures are best when they’re unsentimental. The result is just realistic enough to be perfect, a grade-schooler’s idyllic summer with limited demands for learning and bettering and a whole lot of reveling in kid priorities. A wonderful late-winter reminder that summer is coming, this will cheer up audiences by encouraging them to reflect on glorious summers past and even more glorious summers to anticipate.” (starred review) (The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books )
* “Frazee brings out the typical energy of a couple of boys who may scoff at nature and seem to prefer watching TV, but it is through her artful illustrations that readers catch glimpses of just how savvy and creative these kids can be. . . . This intergenerational story will elicit howls of laughter and requests for repeated readings.” (starred review) (School Library Journal )
User Ratings and Reviews
1 Star What is happening to our children’s books?
I am completely appalled that this book won the 2009 Caldecott Award. Not only is it an unoriginal and drab story but to me, this represents everything that is wrong with American culture. Children are shaped by the things they read and see from a very young age, this book is not a positive influence. It encourages gluttony and mindless activity while discouraging acquisition of important knowledge (nature camp).
5 Stars A Really Good Book
A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever
Is a good book and is very funny. It amuses people all ages. My whole class laughed at it. The two boys are named James and Eamon and go to Eamon’s grand parents.
They want to stay at their house eat junk food and play video games, but Bill, James grandfather loves nature most of all in cold places with penguins so sends them to camp. In the book you never actually see them at camp, but only going to camp.
A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever
is full of humor and is definitely worth getting.
5 Stars A strong mCaldecott contender
Marla Frazze’s best picture book to date. A seamless blend of pictures and text. Laugh out loud funny and a great choice for ages 4-10. When you read the text, keep in mind that Frazee hand wrote every word in the book.
5 Stars Delightful and Timeless
A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever is as merry and timeless as Robert McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal. James and Eamon, best friends, go to visit Eamon’s grandparents, Bill and Pam, at the beach for a week during the summer. During the day, Bill has the boys attend nature camp as he loves everything to do with nature, especially cold places with penguins. The boys don’t exactly love camp. As a matter of fact, you never actually see the boys at camp throughout the story. You only see Bill driving them to and from camp with the boys making sarcastic comments in the backseat (see the endpapers for some pictures of the boys at camp). James and Eamon would much rather stay at Bill and Pam’s playing video games, eating ice cream icebergs and banana waffles, and turning their blow-up mattress into a trampoline. In other words, they don’t want to do much of anything. Heck, they don’t even want to change their shorts throughout the week. For James and Eamon, the best week ever consists of an air mattress in the downstairs bedroom, fun food, and the company of a best friend. It’s just that simple. Now, where do I sign up for a vacation like that?
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4 Stars boys will be boys
James and his friend Eamon are going to Nature Camp for a week. It’s a day camp near Eamon’s grandparent’s beach front house where the boys spend their week. If you want to see what they did at camp all you need to read are the endpapers which are snapshots of their time at camp. Their best week ever happened at Bill and Pam’s (Eamon’s grandparent’s) house.
Bill’s a nice old guy who has traveled the world, loves penguins, and wants to talk about Antarctica all the time. The boys couldn’t care less. Pam’s cooking is better than anything the boys get at home, but probably because all she serves them is banana waffles. The boys stay in the basement, sleep on an inflatable mattress that serves as a fort, a trampoline, and a couch for their video game playing. They wear the same shorts all week long.
James and Eamon are boys, true boys, marginally overseen by adults, living the summer that boys dream of. Their week over, the boys look out over the ocean at night, feeling something they can’t articulate. But they know what to do: they collect driftwood, small rocks and mussel shells and assemble a miniature Antarctica complete with penguins on the deck. They hug Pam and Bill and hope they can go to Nature Camp again soon.
Frazee knows boys. At the very least she knows these boys, and she knows that with boys everything is indirect. Bill asks them if they want to go see the penguin exhibit at the zoo, they boys say they’ll think about it, and then they run away. They aren’t trying to be rude, they’re just boys doing what boys do, which is run away from conflict. I don’t have a problem with this, because Frazee presents this with the same carefree attitude that boys bring with them. At the very end of their week when the boys don’t know how to address their feelings of sorrow they do what boys do best: they build things, the express their feeling physically.
I’m on the fence between calling this a good picture book and a great picture book. It’s heart is in the right place, the humor is dry and authentic, but I’m left feeling like their best week ever needed a little more of an anchor, maybe one or two more activities to solidify their week. Their days are taken up with Nature Camp — which is never shown, and I’m fine with that — but I wish they’d had more time at Pam and Bill’s to build or create or invent some week-long project that could mirror the building of their summer friendship.
Will boys like it? Probably. Will they get it? Maybe. Does it matter? Nope.
Carls Summer Vacation
Carl the rottweiler and his family are at their cottage by the lake. Mom tells her young daughter and Carl to take a nap, but the
The Little Black Book of Walt Disney World The Essential Guide to All the Magic
The Little Black Book of Walt Disney World The Essential Guide to All the Magic
Travel Roundup: Best Travel Series of the Year, 2008. Hooper, Brad (author). FEATURE. First published September 15, 2008 (Booklist). We select the Little Black Travel Books as our travel guide series of the year. The main reasons for designating these guides as best of the year are their portability and user friendliness. (The spiral binding allows the reader to keep the book open to a certain page.) Individual volumes are small enough to fit into a pocket, but in terms of helpfulness, they are twice their physical dimensions. The other reason these guides are so worthy of praise is the fact that each volume has a neat, tidy, and nicely detailed foldout map to the particular area under discussion. The chapters in each volume correspond to the geographical areas into which the authors divide the city for the tourist. Each chapter gives basics on places to see, available art, and entertainment venues, places to eat and drink, where to shop, and where to stay. You can study a range of guides before your actual trip, but this is definitely a commendable candidate for carrying with you on site. Little Black Travel Books (Peter Pauper Press). –Booklist (American Library Association)
When I buy a guidebook, I usually look for the Frommer’s $ a Day budget guides — Washington D.C. from $80 a Day, Paris from $95 a Day, etc. Why? Well, mostly because I’m a creature of habit. I started buying the Frommer’s and Let’s Go guides years ago because they focus on budget travel. Let’s Go is great for backpackers and those on a really tight budget. Frommer’s is a bit more mature but still budget-minded (think hotels rather than hostels), and I like their ”Suggested Itineraries” section and their maps (Frommer’s maps are among the best). But now that there are so many other guidebooks to choose from, I buy Frommer’s mostly because I can be in and out of the store in minutes rather than hours and I know I’ll come home with a reliable guide. Then, just this past month, everything changed… I discovered something new… You see, when I went to the bookstore to pick up guidebooks for my upcoming honeymoon, I got an idea… Since we’re going around the world with stops in Milan, Lake Como, Dubai, Shanghai, and Tokyo, and I needed to buy a guidebook for each destination. Why not, I thought, buy five different guidebooks (from five different publishers) and compare them to find my favorite. So that’s what I did. I bought one brand for each stop and then, on my way out, I saw a little Paris guide I’d never seen (or heard of) before. So I picked that up too. (I go to Paris at least once a year so I can never have enough Paris guidebooks.) Here’s what I found… and it surprised me: My favorite book of all — for both pre-trip planning and on-the-ground support — is The Little Black Book of Paris. The other guides I bought are all divided into sections this way: Where to Stay, Where to Eat, What to Do. But The Little Black Book of Paris is divided by area. And each area has its own fold-out map (which, to be honest, blows the Frommer’s maps out of the water). While the guide doesn’t have an entire history or culture section like most of the others do — Lonely Planet, TimeOut, Fodor’s, etc — it’s well written and there’s an overview of each area at the beginning of each section. I liked the guide so much I went back to the bookstore to buy more. Unfortunately, they don’t have guides for my other destinations as they’re a fairly new series. They do, however, have one for Washington D.C., where I live, so I bought that. After reading both guides — Paris and D.C. — cover to cover, I got so excited about these guidebooks I called the publisher to see what other books they have in the works. Turns out, Paris, D.C., New York, and Rome are the only guides on shelves to date. But San Francisco and London are due out later this year (July and September respectively). And they hope to publish four a year from now on, with Boston and Disney World on their 2008 list. These books are a real find, and I’m glad I stumbled on them. I encourage you to check them out. –Lori Appling - The Travel Writer’s Life
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Fun little book
I really like this book as it is small enough to throw into my backpack and can be referenced throughout my trip. I have gone through and highlighted areas of interest and I love having the little pull out maps. Great stuff!
2 Stars Possibly one of the worst Disney resource books- ever
While the “Little Black Book of Walt Disney World” did include the info that you’ll find in most Disney guide books, it’s clear that Rona Gindin did little research on the subject before publishing. Firstly, she mentions several attractions and parades that no longer exist, then omitted one table service restaurant that has been open since November 2007 (the Yak and Yeti). It’s true that many of these attractions only closed in 2008, but Disney sites, as well as Disney fan sites, normally have closings posted for at least a year in advance, so it’s not as if their removals were a sudden surprise. Other 2008 guide books all had the updated info. On top of that, Gindin also gets the story-lines wrong for certain rides (i.e. Dinosaur), doesn’t know the names of the main characters from Cars, and calls Star Wars fans “trekkies.” (I’m well aware that this last point is pretty trite, but in my opinion, anyone who publishes a book on any subject should have all their information correct.) This book may suffice for people going to Disney for the first time, but that doesn’t change the fact that they will be armed with incorrect information. My advice- spend a few more dollars and buy the Passporter for Walt Disney World. You’ll never need another guide book again.
4 Stars The Disney Little Black Book
I like the fact, that it is very small and you can stick it in your purse. It’s got alot of information about all of the parks. I will definitely take this with me and tuck it away.
5 Stars An amazing littlebook and so easy to carry around!
We have made several trips to WDW and have often purchased tour books to assist our planning. This little book has an amazing amount of information. One nice thing is it’s size. It is so easy to acrry around with us.
5 Stars compact and complete!
We just got this - it looked like the best ‘insiders’ guide out there. Love it! Small enough to carry and arranged so you can zoom straight to what you’re looking for. We’re not WDW regulars and won’t spend a whole lot of time there so for us, this is ideal for planning and taking along on our trip.
Enchanted April
Stills from Enchanted April (Click for larger image)
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User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars It is truly enchanting!
I’ve had this movie on VHS for years and always pull it out to watch when I’m down in the dumps or feeling blue. It is magical in its ability to cheer me up. The story begins with two weary English women who are tired of the rain, cold and drudgery in their lives. While reading the newspaper they see an add for a castle in Italy that is for available for rent during the month of April. Despite the disapproval of their husbands and society in general, they decide to rent it. In order to pay the bills, they also invite two other women, a young, beautiful socialite and a dowager grand dame. They travel to Italy and the Enchantment begins. The movie is so beautifully shot. You feel immersed in the sights and sounds of a most glorious Italian countryside. You watch as the women begin to break from their cocoon and embrace their lives with joy. Don’t let the fact that movie is nearly 20 years old dissuade you from watching it. It is a classic that I believe will stand the test of many years.
5 Stars April/May SNAFU
Not a review per se, just a comment on the marketing of this long awaited title. What genius decide to release Enchanted April in MAY!
5 Stars I love this movie!
I watch this movie more often than any other. I am so glad it is finally on dvd as I have worn out one vhs copy and almost another. It is so beautiful in many ways. Every time I watch it I feel like I’m going on a little vacation with friends. It has a very mellow feel to it but also makes me laugh. And the scenery… Ahhh!! Heads up- the beginning takes place in a very gray and somber England, but that simply creates a contrast for what is to come once the ladies arrive in beautiful sunny Italy.
5 Stars DVD Region
I ordered ‘Enchanted April’ some years ago from Amazon. The shipper sent me a different video in the same genre because the movie I ordered was only available in Region 2 at the time. I and many others now have multi region players these days.
As I understand this movie is now available in Region 1, is it still a policy only region 1 DVD’s may be shipped to N America? I would like to order some Region 2’s (UK) but why should I bother if they will not be sent to me? Or has that changed now there are multi region players readily available or people who have hacked region codes?
Any advice?
5 Stars At last!
I’ve been waiting for years - literally -for this movie to come out on DVD! It’s lack of availability has left a tremendous hole in my collection. This is a gem of a film that deserves a wider audience and now it will get it. One of the finest ensembles of actors imaginable in a setting that will make you long to visit Italy. It will reaffirm your faith in the ability of the human heart to return to life regardless of how long it’s been lying dormant. Once you’ve seen “Enchanted Aprl”, it will become one of those comfort films to which you’ll return again and again.
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Main Content
A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week EverA Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever * “Frazee (Roller Coaster) salutes grandparents...
