I will preface this review with the fact that I am a fan of Mike Thaler as an author and his Black Lagoon series of books. As the title surmises, this is about Hubie's summer vacation. Getting the basics out of the way, the print is a good size print for the young reader and the pictures certainly aid the story and help the reader along. I will even one further on this one. The pictures also contain dialect that keep the reader involved, mixing storyline with humor.

In this book our main character Hubie is off for summer vacation. He is bored to tears and tries to come up with creative things to do. Finally he comes up with making a Lemon Popsicle stand. He figured it would be a good idea since it was hot that summer. In the end Hubie has a great summer vacation because he gets to do things with his friend, Eric.

There are two things however that prevented this story from getting a perfect rating. When Hubie goes to mom to get some ideas of what he could do, Mom counter's with chores which Hubie quickly and successfully escapes from. I think this sends the wrong message to kids. Kids at this age are impressionable and if they can get a story line where their chores are hard work and he could still use that time to think up something better, that would have been a better story line.

The other thing was that for this particular story, Hubie seems to have been dumbed down. Normally Hubie is a pretty creative kid who thinks up ideas to do well and be successful. In this story, Hubie doesn't seem to know that lemonade popsicles melt in the hot sun without any refrigeration. All I am saying is that this Hubie was inconsistent with the other Hubies I read in past Black Lagoon stories.

I would still recommend this story however. I was a lot of fun to read and I think the kids would get a kick out of it. ( )

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