So yesterday, in the car, on the way to school, my kiddo says this:
“This book changed my life! It actually made me love books. I usually read just for the points, but I didn’t read this one for the points, I didn’t even know how many points it was!”.
Be still my heart. The moment I’ve been waiting for, for almost a DECADE!! This is a book I had to read. 🙂
11 Birthdays: A Wish Novel by Wendy Mass Published by Scholastic Paperbacks on January 1st 2010
Genres: Middle Grade
Pages: 272
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It's Amanda's 11th birthday and she is super excited---after all, 11 is so different from 10. But from the start, everything goes wrong. The worst part of it all is that she and her best friend, Leo, with whom she's shared every birthday, are on the outs and this will be the first birthday they haven't shared together. When Amanda turns in for the night, glad to have her birthday behind her, she wakes up happy for a new day. Or is it? Her birthday seems to be repeating iself. What is going on?! And how can she fix it? Only time, friendship, and a little luck will tell. . .
I can see why Hanna liked this book so much. It was easy to read, with a plot that really captured you from the get go. She calls it her first “page turner”. She liked the characters, but mostly the story line. She literally read this one for hours, chapters at a time. I thought it was a cute book. It was easy to read, the sentences were fairly short, and to the point. We recently read a book where the author added unnecessary phrases to many of the sentences, which made it really complicated, confusing, and difficult to read.  I think when you’ve got a kid who doesn’t love reading, you’ve got to make the story easy to read and understand. I’m not saying you have to talk to them like they’re babies… but make the writing flow at the very least.
It’s kind of funny. This isn’t a book I would have picked for her. I’ve been finding books related to things she already likes, horses, animals… and this is the one that hit. She’s been looking at all the other Wendy Mass books, and is begging me to hit Barnes and Noble this weekend.
She’s also found a couple other series (Cupcake Diaries and Confectionately Yours) she thinks will be good. She’s not able to completely articulate what she loved so much about this book, she says she doesn’t know what she liked best about it, she liked ALL of it.  I’m glad she did. I’m glad it’s created an excitement around reading for her, and I’m happily willing to buy more books. 🙂
Apparently Hanna isn’t the only kid who loved this book… there are hundreds of reviews on Amazon, many of them from other 4th graders. 🙂 Speaking of school… in case you’re wondering this book is a BL 4.1 and worth 7.0 AR points.
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