A very short book! Which is a nice change, since I was slogging through some 600 page books recently.
The basic premise? Zoey is trying to attract the attention of a fairy godmother so she can become cool before sixth grade. Because if you’re not cool before sixth grade, then you won’t be cool in sixth grade.
The format is different. There’s some cartoons and pictures. And sometimes the font is just crazy and all over the place. And in some cases, it’s even in screenplay format. It does really give you the sense that a nearly-11-year-old wrote it. To some extent, annoyingly so!
Just a few pages into it and I felt scatterbrained. I felt like I was listening to a girl ramble on, taking me on all sorts of tangents. Focus! Focus!
But eventually I got into it and could just flow with it. It helped to know it was short.
Zoey is a girl I could like, even if she did seem obsessed with clothes and hair. She also liked catching bullfrogs and making Law and Order references. She seemed real.
I also liked the end pretty well. It wasn’t that she learned being cool wasn’t everything. Or that you didn’t have to dress right and act right and be a drone to be cool. It was more that I got the sense she was still working out who she was. And that she’d just made one or two choices along the way of deciding who she wasn’t.
And perhaps that what’s cool and what isn’t is really fickle and hard to pin down at any given time.
I think this is one of those books that teachers and librarians like to give to ‘reluctant readers’. The length of it and the varying format could keep some kids interested who might not otherwise be. Or it might drive others to distraction like it nearly did me!
I did like it enough that I may seek out other books by this author, Margie Palatini. The About the Author mentioned a Bad Boys series, which sounds intriguing.
I feel like I should end this review with some cartoons of myself. But that ain’t gonna happen. You’ll just have to imagine that I did.
“Scatterbrained” was how I described it, too.
Although I was really annoyed by the writing style, perhaps more so than the both of you, I do see its merits, and I really like how you put it: “It was more that I got the sense she was still working out who she was. And that she’d just made one or two choices along the way of deciding who she wasn’t.”