A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever

A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever by Marla Frazee
2008

     Eamon and James are staying at Eamon's grandparents house for a week so they can attend Nature Camp.  As the week goes by, the boys spend more and more time indoors, playing video games and eating banana waffles. They start acting as one, to the point that Bill -Eamon's grandfather- nicknames them Jamon.  The two friends become inseparable and they only discover their love for the outdoors on their last night together, building with shells, rocks, and logs, a diorama of Antarctica (Bill's favorite place in the world).
     A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever is hilarious.  A lot of the comedy comes from the contradictions between the images and the text, like when we read that James was very sad to see his mother drive away, but we see him smiling happily and waving goodbye.  Or when we read that Bill teaches the boys a lot of new vocabulary words during their drives together and we see in the picture that he's actually cursing.  There is also the instance when Bill hands the boys binoculars to do some bird watching and we see the boys pointing them at each other and commenting through dialogue bubbles: "His freckles are HUGE," "Yeah, and his tongue is GROSS." Frazee is able to portray two boys being boys, picking video games over spending time outdoors, and it never feels like she's passing a judgement on them.  The boys friendship is infectious.  The illustrations are fun and delightful and offer a lot of insight into the boys friendship and adventures.