How to lure children from picture books into chapter books – those with fewer illustrations and more text –- is a tricky task and surely an important one for creating new generations of readers. As bait for the current, computer-sophisticated batch of new readers, Lobster Press uses an Internet tie-in to help market its series by first-time B.C. author Trina Wiebe: children are invited to visit the books’ heroines, Abby and Tess, at an interactive web site. Judging from these first two volumes of the Abby and Tess Pet-Sitters series, the books themselves have several appealing elements. Each centres on a mishap involving a different animal left under the girls’ care. From goldfish and a lizard, Abby and Tess seem to be working their way up through the animal kingdom, as two forthcoming titles feature hamsters and piglets. Each also contains a bit of a mystery, satisfactorily resolved by the girls working together. The absurd situations promised by the titles are plausibly developed in the stories, and quite likely to tickle the funny bone of a young reader.

While imparting a fair amount of information about the animals, the books are concerned at heart with the relationship between the two sisters, and with 10-year-old Abby’s struggles to show her parents that she can manage her pet-sitting jobs. The books focus clearly on Abby’s hopes and anxieties, and although there is a different animal and a different funny crisis each time, a sense of pattern and familiarity is established through running jokes and recurrent details such as the description of the apartment building where the girls live, with its cooking smells in the corridor and opera-loving neighbours. Much of the humour in the stories comes from six-year-old Tess, who likes to pretend she is a dog. The sisters and their comical mishaps are reminiscent of Beverly Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona, and they inhabit a world that’s similarly loving, protected, and secure. Abby gets seriously annoyed with Tess, but eventually acknowledges her younger sister’s loyalty and good intentions, and the books end with a warm affirmation of family life. Although the stories are deliberately limited in their focus and somewhat predictable, the language is lively, and the use of some challenging words like “vivarium” shows Wiebe’s refreshing awareness that a meaty word in the right context is just the sort of bait to entice a young reader.