So Bean and Ivy's behavior just seemed obnoxious to me. Her panic, when she can't find her screaming younger sister, is genuine. It's clear from the story that Nancy, whatever her snotty eleven-year-old failings, genuinely cares for Bean. I kept expecting some of the balance seen in the previous installment of the series, Ivy + Bean Break the Fossil Record, to surface here - for there to be some moment when Bean realizes she is in the wrong - but it doesn't happen. But here, as I watched Ivy and Bean create a mess, which Nancy cleaned up for them, before blackmailing Nancy into sharing some of her baby-sitting money (by threatening to expose her makeup adventures), I began to be significantly less charmed.

Somehow, despite some rather dubious incidents (like throwing worms into her sister's face!), the first book just didn't bother me that much. All the mean-spirited brattiness that my online friend Marian decried, in her review of the first book, is very much in evidence here. Will Nancy be able to rescue them, when they accidentally lock themselves in.?Ivy + Bean Take Care of the Babysitter is my least favorite entry, thus far, in Annie Barrows and Sophie Blackall's chapter-book series about two second-grade friends. With Nancy in the bathroom trying on their mother's (forbidden) makeup, the two friends decide to explore the crawl space/attic that Bean has always been told she must not enter. To add insult to injury, Nancy is getting paid for being her babysitter! Determined to escape from this 'captivity,' Bean summons Ivy to her aid, by means of a distress flag (which she ends up having to toss out her window at her oblivious friend), and the two are soon plotting away.

Called away from an exciting game of volcano, involving a gargantuan mound of dirt in Sophie W.'s front yard, and all the neighborhood children, Bean in aghast to learn that her parents have put her in the care of her older sister Nancy for the afternoon, and that she is not allowed to leave the house.

Ivy and bean by annie barrows