Freckle Juice

Freckle Juice is a story about a second grade boy, Andrew Marcus, who is envious of his classmate, Nicky Lane’s, freckles. Andrew sits in class and counts the hundreds of freckles that Nicky has. He constantly gets called out by the teacher for not paying attention because he is daydreaming about freckles. One day, Sharon, a terrible little girl in Andrew’s class, whom he does not like, tells Andrew that she has a secret recipe that makes you grow freckles. She tells him that it will cost 50 cents (5 weeks worth of allowance), but it would guarantee him all of the freckles that he wanted. Andrew agrees to the deal and the next day in class he exchanges Sharon the 50 cents in return for the Freckle Juice recipe. Andrew goes home and immediately begins to concoct the recipe. It is a mixture of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, cranberry juice, and lemon juice. He mixes up all the ingredients and then drinks it as fast as he can (because that is what the recipe said to do). After he drinks it he gets a painful stomach ache and crawls into his mother’s room to look in the mirror to see if he has grown any freckles. Unfortunately he had not grown any freckles, but he was getting sicker by the moment. When his mom arrived home to find her son curled up on the floor, she gave him some medicine and sent him to bed, where he laid for 2 days. On the 3rd morning his mother came in his room and woke him up for school. Although Andrew was feeling much better, he did not want to face Sharon without having freckles on his face. Andrew came up with a plan t draw freckles on his face, but he did not have a brown marker, so he had to settle for blue. When Andrew walked into class with blue dots all over his face, the entire class began to laugh and the teacher called him to her desk. She handed him a closed box and told him that it was magic freckle remover and that he should go to the bathroom and use it. Andrew agreed with hesitation, and he immediately went to the bathroom and used the lemon-scented freckle remover. When he returned to class all of hit “freckles” were gone, and Nicky approached his teacher’s desk. He asked his teacher if he could have some of the freckle remover because he hated his freckles. Andrew could not believe it! He did not understand why Nicky did not want his freckles, but after drinking the freckle juice, Andrew no longer cared is he had freckles or not.
I really enjoyed this book because it teaches a good lesson about accepting yourself as you are, and not taking anything for granted. Andrew wanted freckles because he did not have them, and Nicky hated his freckles because he did have them. This book is a perfect example of “the grass is not always greener on the other side”.