A GIRL, A BOY, AND THREE ROBBERS

On the three afternoons a week Brandon spends at Hannah’s house, he claims he would rather watch TV than play Hannah’s imaginative games, but he can’t resist the real adventures when neighbor children decide they want to keep Hannah’s horrible cat. The episodic plot of this sequel to A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat (2007) seems to lurch rather than roll forward. Young readers may be confused by the fact that while some chapters are self-contained episodes, other adventures require several installments. The three scary Sunderlands, a pair of first-grade twins and their oversized younger brother are not so much frightening as badly behaved, and Brandon, Hannah and fat, orange Buttercup the cat are equally weakly developed characters. On the other hand, Hannah has an admirable imagination and makes good use of familiar literary characters. Readers who enjoyed the humor and energy of the first novel will certainly want to see what she and Brandon are up to in this installment. Cepeda’s infrequent angular grey-scale drawings add interest to this text-heavy chapter book. (Fiction. 7-9)