The Infamous Ratsos: Project Fluffy

September 1, 2018
It's Poetry Month--time for the First Annual Peter Rabbit Elementary School Poetry Contest!First-, second-, and third-place winners each get a gift certificate to Clawmart. Rat brothers Louie and Ralphie Ratso intend to win so they can buy new skateboards. But then woodchuck Chuck Wood, the coolest kid in school, derails the brothers' plans. Chuck has a crush on geek-girl gardener Fluffy, a spectacles-wearing rabbit pal of Louie's, and he wants Louie's help getting her attention. Soon Louie's abandoning his brother and their poetry project to carry out Project Fluffy. Louie's advice: give her flowers, write her a poem, give her candy. After all, girls love that stuff: "It's, like, a fact," Louie tells Chuck prior to each attempt. After numerous failures, Ralphie tells his brother: "Fluffy is a person and not a project." Their dad, Big Lou, agrees: "Women aren't projects or objects." To get a girl's attention you need to find out what she likes and take an interest in it. When Louie passes this advice to Chuck, will the love-struck groundhog give it a try? A wry, third-person, present-tense voice narrates this story about crushes, brothers, and togetherness. While the denouement is developmentally spot-on (Fluffy and Chuck decide to be friends), the heteronormative assumptions about romance feel a little stodgy. Large type, lots of comedic black-and-white illustrations, and reading-level-appropriate text suit the book to newly independent readers.The Ratso brothers' third outing is good, anthropomorphic fun. (Animal fantasy. 5-9)

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November 1, 2018
Grades 1-3 A poetry contest and a bit of romantic intrigue lead the Ratso brothers, their fellow animal students, and, of course, readers to further insights about friendship and respect for others. Shrugging off plans to work with his sib Ralphie on a poem, Louie agrees to help cool kid Chuck Wood get classmate Fluffy to notice him. But Louie's hackneyed ideas about what girls like ?flowers, candy, displays of athletic prowess?get zero traction with Fluffy, who is laser focused on her patch of community garden. Once Chuck breaks out of his own self absorption and actually notices this, he's able to make strides. On the other paw, along with getting an earful from his single dad ( Women aren't projects, or objects ), and having alienated his brother, Louie is left to his own literary devices. His rhymed apology is far clumsier than Ralphie's sentimental verse about friendship, but sincere and sufficient to re-cement the brothers' relationship. A pleaser for fledgling chapter-book readers, rather more heavily and explicitly agenda-driven than previous episodes, but chock full of positive values and life lessons.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)