TALES OF A FOURTH GRADE NOTHING

Nine-year-old Peter Warren Hatcher has resigned himself to losing the battle of sibling rivalry; his two-and-a-half-year-old brother Fudge manages to get all the attention — upstaging Peter in front of his father's business associates, ruining the poster he has made for a school project, getting lost at the movies and (the unkindest cut of all) swallowing his pet turtle. Fudge's antics are standard toddler attention-getters (and his selection as star of a TV commercial considerably overrates his potential as an entertainer), but Peter's jaundiced observations exploit their risibility to the fullest. Yet the absence of any palpable jealousy or anger in Peter's reportage causes it to degenerate into a series of momentarily amusing anecdotes, and, if not exactly a nothing, Peter is considerably less than might have been expected from the author of Then Again, Maybe I Won't (1971).