Ivy and Bean

Mischief over minor matters

It’s still Wednesday somewhere! That’s not actually true, but it would be if I lived just on the other side of the international date line. That has to count for something, right?

Anyway, here’s a recent-ish discovery in this household that has collectively won us over. Let’s get into a containable amount of trouble with …

The Series: Ivy and Bean
The Author: Annie Barrows
The Illustrator: Sophie Blackall
Length/Picture Density: 80ish pages, pictures throughout

What if you took the Dory Fantasmagory story and tried to make it a little more realistic? Dory, some of you will recall, has an intense imagination. She knows the stories that consume her brain are not real, but she acts like they are real most of the tie, to the point of setting up elaborate traps for her enemy, a 507-year-old robber named Mrs. Gobble Gracker. She also has two best friends who get wrapped up in her stories too, Rosabelle, who “is” a princess, and George, who is a charming maniac.

So, a dialed back version of that might replace Mrs. Gobble Gracker and Dory’s best monster friend and fairy godmother with some more ambiguous mysteries. A chilly cloud outside the school bathroom could be a ghost. Some bones dug up in the backyard could be dinosaur bones. They could get themselves into awkward social situations because they buy into their own theories a little too hard.

The Dory character could be mischievous with some focus issues, but not fully immersed in fantasy as often or as intensely as Dory, and the Rosabelle character could be quieter, more bookish than her counterpart with a sneaky streak but not the full-on princess thing. We’re discarding Bennie and consolidating Dory’s siblings into a bossy older sister who she is semi-constantly at war with. Oh, and we’re aging the main characters by a year or two.

Do all that and you have Ivy and Bean. Bean is the Dory character, Ivy is Rosabelle. The books are shorter than the Dory ones (but there are more of them!), and they require more of a tolerance for awkward situations. Like digging up a bunch of bones from your backyard, convincing yourself they are dinosaur bones, telling everyone in your school to come over to see the dinosaur bones, and then realizing before they get there that they’re probably dog bones.

Actually, the situations Dory gets into could be intensely embarrassing, but she seems partly immune because we mostly see her with her family, who know her deal, her friends, who play along, and her imaginary friends. Ivy and Bean, however, are more exposed because they face more normalizing social pressures at home and (especially) at school. The tension and the action are more interpersonal and realistic.

Still, the consequences of what can happen to them tend to be refreshingly normal: embarrassment, getting into trouble, not too much else. Even those tend to only really be a present danger for the last two or three chapters, and things always work out in their favor, or close enough.

The Ivy and Bean books manage to walk the line between quirky and realistic in a way I find really likable. For better or worse, they also happen to be the perfect length for getting me to extend bedtime, because the ending is usually in reach when it should be lights out time, and everyone wants to find out how it ends.