In one of the few published essays outside of this collection that seriously analyzes Early Readers from a literary standpoint, Jennifer Miskec compares Annie Barrows’ Ivy and Bean series to the American Girls books and, briefly, to the Pippi Longstocking books. She ultimately concludes:

It is in Barrows’ series that traditional value systems are troubled to the degree that these contemporary representations are more than just shallow updates-and unlike Pippi Longstocking, Ivy and Bean could actually exist … Perhaps it is from the margins that Barrows has the freedom to poke holes in dominant ideology, to challenge normalizing representations of girlhood without mere wholesale hierarchical inversions, reliance on the fantastic, or objectifying the girl. (170)

My aim here is to consider further some of the ways in which Early Readers may potentially trouble traditional value systems from the margins of both early childhood and gender. While Miskec cleverly shows the queering offered by Barrows’ texts (her article is aptly titled “Meet Ivy and Bean, Queerly the Anti-American Girls”) and is right to highlight their general realism, the texts do offer a reliance on the fantastic through their characters’ interest in it-in ghosts and witches and magic in particular. Although both of the main characters in the texts are deviant girls, Ivy’s deviance takes the shape of wishing-and training-to be a witch. In other words, she is portrayed as a “weird girl” in ways that can be seen as complementary to Pippi Longstocking’s own earlier supernatural (and tomboyish) “weird girl-ness,” an inclusion which, strangely enough, may also work to downplay the texts’ queerness by situating them within the framework of a larger trend in Early Readers today.