While learning about the environment and planet Earth ("Sometimes I think gravity is a pity") Clarice Bean winds up with Robert Granger ("I mainly like to ignore him"), as her class partner. Robert wants to do a project on who walks faster, a snail or a worm, but Clarice Bean finds this topic exceedingly boring. Besides, there's something a lot more interesting going on at home. Brother Kurt has become an ecowarrior, which involves sitting in a doomed-to-be-felled tree, waving signs that say "Free the Tree ("because it rhymes"), and sometimes perching together with the whole family, eating spaghetti marinara. Award-winning author-illustrator Lauren Child's by-now familiar, zany style (Clarice Bean, That's Me, Clarice Bean, Guess Who's Babysitting?) features collage illustrations with scribbly drawings and real photos, and fonts gone mad: big, little, upside-down, spiraling, sideways... whatever the text calls for, no holds barred. This Eloise of the 21st century is as weirdly appealing as any eccentric child you're likely to come across, reading comic books "with the T-shirts and undies in the laundry room." (Ages 6 to 10) --Emilie Coulter