SUPERFUDGE

In Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), Peter Hatcher's amusing tales were really all about his two-and-a-half-year-old brother Fudge. Now Peter is in sixth grade and Fudge, at four, is still the star of the family comedy—this despite the arrival of Tootsie, whom Peter anticipates with outrage and dismay and Fudge receives with characteristic manifestations of sibling displacement. When Fudge can't sell Tootsie or give her away, he covers her with trading stamps in hopes of exchanging her. And when he's not tampering with Tootsie, Fudge is terrorizing his kindergarten teacher or embarrassing the principal (and, indirectly, his older brother) at a school assembly. Peter, on the sidelines, has a few less dramatic experiences of his own—eating a neighbor's worm cookies is about the wildest—but his wry reporting of Fudge's doings gives the story his stamp, and through it all he manages to give the impression that he has a life of his own. Like Tales. . . ., this is light as Uncle Feather (that's Fudge's pet myna bird), reads like a breeze, and bubbles with fourth-grade-level humor.