This lightweight supernatural fare has more originality than most assembly-line series books. 'Great-Grandpa's in the Litter Box' sports the most unique plot of the bunch, with its cigar-chomping stray cat who claims to be the reincarnation of Zack's great-grandpa Julius. But the others are odd and entertaining enough to keep readers dedicated to the affable fifth grader while 'weird stuff follows [him] around like a puppy.'

Gr 2-4--In this entry in the series, Zack, a fifth grader, tells of meeting his future son. In a fairly standard take on time travel, Zack's son Mack, 10, goes on a class trip to see what the "old" New York of 1997 was like. He accidentally runs into his dad-to-be after buying the Wade Boggs card Zack had been coveting. It turns out that Mack is trying to buy the card to replace the one his dad cherished and he had accidentally lost. This little sidetrack separates Mack from his classmates, and the rest of this slight tale revolves around the race to find the schoolbus before it returns to the future. Mack begins flickering, and the fear that he might miss the bus and de-atomize (disappear) provides what little suspense there is in the story. This breezy bit of fluff should attract reluctant readers, and perhaps a few others. There's no real plot or character development, and the elements involving time travel are extremely derivative, coming straight from movies like Back to the Future. The full-page, black-and-white cartoons add little. For collections where the "Zack" books are popular.--Tim Wadham, Dallas Public Library, TX