Ivy and Bean: No News Is Good News

Annie Barrows · ★★★

Not my favorite of the Ivy + Bean books but my daughter is now fully invested in the series and characters so they can really do no wrong, which is great because they do a lot of wrong in this one, essentially bullying their entire neighborhood in order to get cash for their obsession with (thinly veiled) Babybel cheese, of which they really only want the wax covering to play with. Ivy + Bean's first foray into the moral and ethical corruption of materialism doesn't have as nice a ring to it as No News Is Good News so I understand the choice of titles but what I didn't understand was how the book could end without any reflection on what their drive to earn money cost them throughout the book. It stayed obnoxiously light where other books in the series may have at least alluded to a more interesting discussion. Anyway, my daughter loved the book and loved hearing the girls get be powerful and smart and get away with everything they wanted to so 3 and a half cheers for the empowerment but a relatively low score for the uncharacteristic superficiality in a series that has been thus far very clever about smuggling through interesting things to think about.