A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever [Hardcover]

Marla Frazee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2008 | Age Range: 6 - 9 years | Lexile Measure: 680L (What's this?)

When James and Eamon go to a week of Nature Camp and stay at Eamon's grandparents' house, it turns out that their free time spent staying inside, eating waffles, and playing video games is way more interesting than nature. But sometimes things work out best when they don't go exactly as planned.  

This Caldecott Honor-winning book is a moving and hilarious celebration of young boys, childhood friendships, and the power of the imagination, where Marla Frazee captures the very essence of summer vacation and what it means to be a kid.

Editorial Reviews

Review

* "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 20080218)

* “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 20080201)

* “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 20080301)

* “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 20080301)

About the Author

MARLA FRAZEE has illustrated many picture books, including Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers and Harriet, You'll Drive Me Wild! by Mem Fox, as well as her own Walk On! and Santa Claus the World's Number One Toy Expert. She lives in Pasadena, California.

 

 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Age Range: 6 - 9 years
  
• Hardcover: 40 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt Children's Books (March 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0152060200
• ISBN-13: 978-0152060206
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.5 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #108,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightful and Timeless February 26, 2008

By Ami Hassler

Format:Hardcover

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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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars boys will be boys February 19, 2008

By delzey

Format:Hardcover

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Really Good Book February 12, 2009

A Kid's Review

Format:Hardcover

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.