A Bargain for Frances

We stopped at Food Books on the way home from my parents' house. (Apparently it's really called Traveler Restaurant, but we always refer to it as Food Books because they have a huge sign visible from the highway that says:

Traveler
FOOD
and 
BOOKS 

) This is our regular stop on the way home, and we all look forward to it. While waiting for our food, we go around and look at their selection of books, and K usually chooses a few to bring home. You get three free with your meal.

Today we scored a book called "Be Polite" with Grover on the cover, and "A Bargain for Frances" by Russell Hoban. I am not that crazy about the Frances books, at least not for this age. I like "Bread and Jam for Frances", but I think many of the books have somewhat negative messages that K is not quite ready to process. For instance, I got "A Baby Sister for Frances" before X was born, but we didn't end up reading it because half of it was about how Frances hated her baby sister. The idea that K should hate the new baby or feel jealous never occurred to him, and I didn't want to put the thought in his head. In "A Best Friend for Frances", Frances and her friend Albert and her sister Gloria are all pretty mean to each other, even though it works out at the end. In "Bedtime for Frances", Frances eventually goes to bed to avoid being spanked.

 So I wasn't sure about "A Bargain for Frances." As soon as we started reading it, though, I realized that even though I didn't recall reading any of the Frances books as a kid, I definitely read this one. I didn't remember what happened, but I remembered so many details about the story that I must have read it dozens of times. It's about how Frances' friend tricks her into buying a tea set, and then Frances tricks the friend into buying it back. Like most of the Frances books, all the meanness is resolved in the last few pages. This wasn't enough for K, who dislikes reading about or watching any kind of real-life conflict. He only likes conflict in terms of "bad guys", and hates it on the rare occasion when I try to talk to him about how in real life, there are no "bad guys" and if you shoot someone you can hurt or even kill them. So we will probably pass on "A Bargain for Frances" to someone else.