RICH AND FAMOUS IN STARVATION LAKE

Whelan returns to the wintry midwestern locale of Welcome to Starvation Lake (not reviewed) for a tongue-in-cheek tale of fundraising gone awry. The boys and the girls of Starvation Lake Elementary’s fourth grade are working on separate plans to raise money to help defray the cost of an overnight at ecology camp. Since a car wash doesn’t seem practical (it has been snowing for 23 straight days, after all), the boys decide to go with the suggestion of Mark, the undertaker’s son, to offer private viewings of a corpse at 50¢ a head. The girls settle on a candy sale—but making the candy in Stacey’s gloriously neglected kitchen means mixing some decidedly gray chocolate, and similarly unprepossessing ingredients, into an unwashed pot with something nameless in the bottom. Shocking surprises ensue, as Mark’s father, twigging to the boys’ plan, decides to play a little joke, and the candy’s unusual flavor draws an offer from the Love ’Em Candy Company for the recipe—which becomes forever a mystery in the wake of Stacey’s mom’s sudden cleaning spree. Then the local TV news cameras arrive. There’s an air of offhand innocence to these young go-getters that Cravath (Shark Swimathon, 2000, etc.) captures artfully, both in her full-page scenes and an opening portrait gallery. The children come out of the enterprise a little wiser—and, in the end, the snow finally stops too. Young chapter-book readers will chuckle. (Fiction. 9-10)