title: Freddy and the French Fries #1:: Fries Alive!
author:  David Baldacci 
description: Grade 4-6It's not easy being a boy genius when your father runs a floundering health-conscious burger joint and your older sister's a deeply annoying wannabe actress. But Freddy T. Funkhouser isn't distressed. He has a plan to win the prize for the best float at the local Founders' Day Parade and bring more attention to his dad's business. To do so, he has constructed five life-sized mechanical fries, each with its own personality. The hope is to bring these kooky creations to life through nanotechnology and a million jiggy-watts of power and then use them on his float. Yet when an experiment involving a dam and a bolt of lightning does awaken the electric fries, Freddy finds his troubles have only just begun. Baldacci, best known for his adult thrillers, is attempting to reach out to reluctant readers by creating a series very much in the vein of Dav Pilkey's "Captain Underpants" series (Scholastic), but for an older audience. Unfortunately, he lacks Pilkey's gleeful silliness and relies too heavily on gross-out jokes and slapstick pratfalls. His attempt to teach kids about the importance of friends and sticking together gets bogged down by poor writing and two-dimensional characters.<i>Elizabeth Bird, New York Public Library</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Text copyright © 2005 by Freddy and the French Fries, Ltd.
  
  Illustrations copyright © 2005 by Rudy Baldacci
  
  All rights reserved.
  
  Little, Brown and Company
  
  Hachette Book Group USA
  
  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
  
  Visit our Web site at
  [_HachetteBookGroupUSA.com_](http://hachettebookgroupusa.com)
  
  First eBook Edition: July 2008
  
  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any
  similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended
  by the author.
  
  Summary: While competing with a rival restaurant for the winning float in the
  Founder's Day parade, nine-year-old Freddy Funkhouser constructs a batch of
  animated French fries in his secret laboratory that come to life after
  receiving an enormous jolt of electricity.
  
  ISBN: 978-0-316-03393-0
  
  The illustrations for this book were done in pen and ink on illustration
  board.
  
  Contents
  
   _CHAPTER 1: FREDDY FUNKHOUSER_
  
   _CHAPTER 2: THE FUNKHOUSER EXPERIMENT_
  
   _CHAPTER 3: THE JIGGY-WATTS CAPER_
  
   _CHA