The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

I picked up this book to preread it for an 8 year old. It is not one of my kids. I approached and read the book with an 8 year old girl in mind. I also liked the premise a great deal and was looking at doing it for a book study.

The good – The book is about a stack of letters that have clues about plants. This was a very clever premise and was really fun to see if we could guess the plants before the book told us what they were. 13yo guessed every single one correctly. I really the emphasis on friendships and putting down roots. As a family that has moved quite a bit, this one hit home.

The bad – There were two things that were annoying while reading this, and again, it is in the context of reading it for an eight year old. The first thing was the emphasis on crushes and “liking” someone. The characters in the book are 12ish, which in my opinion is rather young for that. Also, kids always read up, so the audience of this book will be younger. It just wasn’t necessary to the story.

The second bad thing was the texting. They all had phones and were texting constantly. I do understand that a large part of the story wouldn’t have worked without the texting, but as parents we are constantly trying to get kids off phones!

The ugly – In my opinion, there is a time and place to introduce and discuss topics around sexuality, racial conflict and the environment. Especially when you are dealing with kids who are in their preteen years. If the book would have inserted ONE of these topics, I probably wouldn’t have minded as much, but all three was a bit much. So, if you have a problem letting your child read about a girl that likes girls, etc, don’t pick up this book. The book should have stuck solely to the enviromental topic. It was introduced gently and done really well. The other two items really felt forced and didn’t add anything to the story.

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