Review: Roscoe Riley Rules #1 Never Glue Your Friends to Chairs

This is an amusing, sometimes hilarious book aimed at young kids. The book series is aimed at a younger audience than Katherine Applegate's The One and Only Ivan, a book that had appeal to a wide age range, from kids to adults. But if you are a parent searching for a book to read with your child, you might find yourself amused by this one.

This book is all about trying to follow rules, but sometimes as a young kid it can be hard. Especially when you don't know all of the rules. I mean, nobody tells you that you can't glue your friends to chairs, and Roscoe's story shows that he wasn't malicious - he just lacked foresight for the consequences of his actions.

The book is written at breakneck speed with single sentence paragraphs, one after the other. This not only helps keep kids interested, but established Roscoe's character as a bit of a spastic kid. He's nice and kind, the kind of kid that you find adorable as a teacher when he's not causing you to rip your hair out (as Roscoe's teacher, Ms. Diz does when telling a kid to take Play-Doh out of his ear). The way he builds up to why he glued his friends to their chairs is logical and amusing. I laughed out loud a few times, especially when his sister Hazel sings the alphabet song:

"...h, i, j, k, Ellen Emmo peed."

And then she wants to know who Ellen Emmo is, to which Roscoe replies that they explain all that in kindergarten.

Roscoe's classroom doesn't quite reflect reality, but it does reflect diversity. It seems there is at least one kid of each race in the world in his first grade classroom.

What's interesting is Applegate's portrayal of teachers. I find many popular children's books portray teachers as cranky, mean curmudgeons (especially the Captain Underpants books). But Applegate shows a lot of sympathy for teachers, in particular how difficult the job is, and anyone who is a teacher who reads these books can appreciate that. Ms. Diz is a first year teacher, and everyone from the students to the parents to the principal is aware of and supportive of that. There's even mention of the kindergarten teacher quitting for a boring office job. As much as Roscoe likes Ms. Diz, who is still working on her classroom management techniques, he can't help but cause her a source of headache by goodnaturedly breaking some rule or another.

I like that Applegate doesn't continue to hoist disrespect upon teachers and understands the difficult job they do. But outside of that, this is a book that you can feel comfortable with your child reading, knowing it will be entertaining and teach some good lessons without being preachy.