Gooney Bird and All Her Charms by Lois Lowry (review)

It’s March in Mrs. Pidgeon’s second-grade classroom, which means it’s time to study the human body. Luckily, Gooney Bird Greene (from Gooney Bird and the Room Mother, BCCB 4/05, etc.) has arranged for her uncle to loan the class a real skeleton from the medical college where he teaches. Soon inspiration strikes, and she leads her classmates (and teacher) in posing the skeleton around the school so as to teach all the students about anatomy. When the skeleton disappears, the class must crack the case before Gooney Bird’s uncle finds out. Gooney Bird—perhaps the youngest in the tradition of temperamental red-haired freckle-faced heroines—amuses and inspires again in this latest installment of her series. As individualistic as ever, she displays her precociousness and fashion sense with a t-shirt reading “Humpty Dumpty was pushed” and a secondhand bracelet featuring the literal charms referred to in the title, and she combines both characteristics in her storytelling. By the time this entertaining chapter book ends, she has found a way to interweave the seemingly disparate charms with the story of the skeleton and all the class learned during his stay at the school, thus modeling for young readers how the pieces of a story come together and providing ample opportunity for reader prediction in both independent and readaloud encounters. With apt jokes, recognizable classroom curriculum, and comfortably familiar characters, not to mention sly jabs at censorship, Lowry’s Gooney Bird and her skeletal adventures will satisfy readers who appreciate a humerus tale.