EDDIE, INCORPORATED

With his father in the produce business, his mother selling homemade goodies, his oldest brother already assistant manager of a shoe store, and his high school brother already working toward a banking career, Eddie too wants a business: "He wanted a desk with a phone on it. . . . He wanted to be a boss." But he and his two friends abandon their aluminum can recycling company when it becomes evident that they are working for one and a half cents an hour each. A lawn mower collision squashes their three-at-a-time lawnmower service. Eddie's foot-odor fighter doesn't work, nor does the trio's neighborhood newspaper. The middle school principal outlaws their 25¢-a-head protection business, even though they deal not in mafia-style threats but in real protection. But all through these episodes are references to the surplus of little kids in the neighborhood and the shortage of sitters, so it's no surprise when Eddie's success turns out to be a baby-sitting agency. Filling in as sitter for Herman the terrible when the scheduled sitter gets sick is nc fun, but Eddie is a responsible boss—and his family's twelfth-birthday gifts of a business calendar, ledger, rubber stamp, and extension phone show that they take him seriously. The story reads smoothly enough, but it's unoriginal in outline, and not bright enough in its particulars to function as anything but a time filler for junior-achievement types.