Andy Shane and his sometimes enemy/sometimes best friend Dolores Starbuckle are back and ready to celebrate Halloween. Dolores’s birthday falls on the holiday and, of course, she’s having a party. Being the bossy girl that she is, she ropes Andy into helping plan it, taking a full two days of clipboard clutching, decorating and making everything perfect. Unfortunately, neighborhood hoodlums mar the plans by twice smashing Dolores’s porch pumpkins. Andy and Dolores put their heads together for something more than party planning and execute a little counterattack of their own, making this Halloween the start of a great friendship. With hilarious yet familiar situations, frequent pen-and-ink illustrations, accessible vocabulary and two characters filled with the feisty spirit of a very young Ramona Quimby, Jacobson’s offering is the perfect treat for newest readers. (Fiction. 5-8)
