April Fool!

Zelda and Ivy: Keeping Secrets
By Laura McGee Kvasnosky
Candlewick Sparks, 42 pages
$4.99, ages 4 to 8

Ah sisters – best friends and occasionally best enemies.

Zelda and Ivy: Keeping Secrets, Seattle resident Laura McGee Kvasnosky's fifth book about the enchanting fox sisters, is newly out in paperback.

Keeping Secrets is the follow-up to Zelda and Ivy: The Runaways, which won the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award, which honors

Perfect for this week, "April Fool," is the middle chapter of this three-chapter beginning reader. It's the story of big sister Zelda's exhaustive attempts to get Ivy back after her that her little sister tells her ears have turned purple.

Zelda's clever tricks - confetti in the umbrella, cucumber slices in the PB&J - go humorously wrong, partly because of bad luck and partly because Ivy's no dummy.

In the third Zelda and Ivy book, Zelda and Ivy and the Boy Next Door, Kvasnosky added a new character, Eugene, a kindred spirit to pensive Ivy and a second player for the commanding Zelda to use in her grand schemes.

The other two chapters in Keeping Secrets involve Eugene. In one, Zelda tells him and Ivy she knows who the tooth fairy is, but warns each not to tell the other. In the last hilarious chapter, there's a butterfly, an opera and a fox sister caught in a net.

The first Zelda and Ivy books were originally published in larger picture book versions. But someone at Candlewick made the brilliant decision to switch them into the compact "I can read" format. They're perfect like this.

All five (including Zelda and Ivy  and Zelda and Ivy One Christmas) are charming and very funny with just the right mix of sisterly rivalry and love. Zelda and Ivy: The Big Picture will come out this fall.
- Rebecca Young