Just before her retirement, Mrs. McBloom's cluttered fifth-grade classroom is cleaned up by her townspeople, who then pay for her dream cruise with proceeds from the ensuing yard sale. This win-win story features appropriately cluttered illustrations with bold colors and madcap details. Some readers may enjoy the narrator's down-home dialect ("folks moseyed through"), others may find it an obstacle.

A retiring teacher has a final assignment for her final class: Find a creative way to clean out 50 years of displays, decorations, supplies, science and crafts projects, books, lost lunches and like clutter to make way for her successor. Bustling about energetically beneath a huge gray beehive, Mrs. McBloom positively exudes teacherly lovability, but though Francis makes a valiant effort to show a half-century's clutter, he draws rather too neatly to carry it off. Still, there's plenty to pore over in the illustrations, from a potted seedling that grows over the years into a huge, gnarled apple tree to tottering stacks of volumes (many with titles related to keeping classrooms in order), scampering rodents of diverse sorts and middens of bric-a-brac. Ultimately, capable young Georgia Peachpit comes up with a winning strategy—invite all of Mrs. McBloom's former students (nearly everyone in the hamlet of Up Yonder) to carry off one item—and the teacher gets a warm send-off. A happy tale of community cooperation as well as a celebration of a career well spent. (Picture book. 6-8)

K-Gr 2-Mrs. McBloom is retiring after 50 years of teaching, and it's time to clean up Room Five for her successor. But that's easier said than done. The classroom has become an ecosystem with trees and animals coexisting peacefully with odd mittens, sneakers, and piles of books. It's a magical mess. Eventually, her students arrive at a solution, and the whole town lines up to select one thing each from the clutter. The resulting yard sale makes enough to send the woman away on the "fancy-shmancy cruise" she had always wanted to take. The artwork's MAD Magazine-style characters are not very appealing, but the wealth of strange objects to be discovered on every page will engage readers' interest. Owls, woodpeckers, chipmunks, and hens that knit are ensconced with art projects, dinosaur fossils, playing cards, and baseballs. The room gradually grows more cluttered from the day Mrs. McBloom starts out in her '50s-style clothes (pictured in black and white), "long before that Armstrong fella set his tootsies on the moon." The story is told in a folksy voice with a rollicking rhythm and rich phraseology. DiPucchio's language will stretch readers' understanding of the different ways that people can turn a phrase, with such expressions as "eye-poppin'," heart-stoppin'," "higgly-piggly," and "smack-dab" sprinkled throughout the text. And kids will relish the idea that adults, too, sometimes need to clean their rooms.-Jane Barrer, Washington Square Village Creative Steps, New York City Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.