Junie B. Jones
That Junie B. Jones is a kindergartner with a MOUTH on her, and that's why everybody loved her books. Barbara Park's first-person tornado narrated school exactly the way kids actually talk — bad grammar and all — which made her a 55-million-copy juggernaut AND a banned-books-list regular.
Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus arrived in 1992, written by Barbara Park, illustrated by Denise Brunkus, and published by Random House. Its heroine — an 'almost six-year-old' with the B very much included — narrated her first day of kindergarten in a voice children's literature had rarely allowed before: first person and gloriously ungrammatical, full of 'holded' and 'favoritest' and opinions about everyone. Kids recognized themselves instantly. The series followed Junie B. through kindergarten and into first grade across more than two dozen books published through 2013 — over 55 million copies sold in North America by the series' twentieth anniversary — a fixture of every elementary classroom bin, book fair, and backpack of the late '90s and 2000s.
The voice that made the books beloved also made them controversial. Teachers and parents complained that Junie B. was a bad role model — mouthy, mischievous, and a walking grammar violation — and the series landed at number 71 on the American Library Association's list of the most banned or challenged books of 2000–2009. Park's defense was serene: a book is of extraordinary value, she said, if it gives the reader nothing more than a smile or two.
Barbara Park died in 2013, the same year the series ended, but Junie B. keeps finding new readers — through the long-running stage musicals, and a graphic-novel series that began arriving in 2025. For everyone who learned to love chapter books through her, the diagnosis is permanent: that Junie B. Jones was trouble on two feet, and that's what made her the favoritest.
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