National Regular Average Ordinary Day

Playing the same old games with his friend Devin is “super boring!” so Peter decides to have fun a new way, all by himself: rating and enjoying all the less commonly celebrated holidays on the calendar. On National Underwear Day, for example, Peter dons garish boxer shorts on every part of his body, and deems the day worthy of eight stars. But when a morning dawns that has no holiday, and Peter can’t invent one that gets any traction (National Ignore Your Sister Day goes over like a lead balloon), he discovers that he “didn’t need something special to do every single day”; an average, ordinary day, especially one in which he patches things up with Devin and the whole neighborhood is outside playing, can be a lot of fun. Readers may wish they could enjoy Peter commemorating more of the goofy real-life holidays, but it’s always good to see both kid ingenuity and the joys of everyday life celebrated, and Katzenberger (A Triceratops Would Not Make a Good Ninja) and Bakos’s (Here Come the Helpers) book should be a fun prompt for calendar-related classroom activities. Ages 3–7. [em]Author’s agent: Natascha Morris, BookEnds Literary. Illustrator’s agent: Anne Moore Armstrong, the Bright Agency. (June) [/em]