SUPERBOWL UPSET

Fifth-grade classmates Ginger Bidwell and Lucas Ridley, both avid sports fans, were rivals long before they became unwilling step-siblings four months ago — but their happy parents are unfailingly patient, even through most of the disasters. Mom wins a dream weekend for four — all expenses paid to the Super Bowl in New Orleans — during which everything goes wrong from the time the tickets don't arrive: the plane's late, obnoxious strangers ``befriend'' them, and then the replacement tickets never materialize, so that the family ends by watching the game on TV in their hotel room — in the company of several unwelcome extras. Predictably, Mom and Dad finally lose their cool, providing a negative example that nudges the kids toward beginning to mend their differences. The situations here never get as comic as Twohill probably intended, perhaps because the family's difficulties are all too plausible; nor does she delve beneath the kids' bickering surface enough to make this more than another sitcom about learning to get along in a new family. Still, a moderately amusing, easily read example of its genre. (Fiction. 8-11)