Friendship Day Books

I purchased this book for my library at home to read to my grandchildren. It is a wonderful story of friends. We have all enjoyed the pictures as well as the great story!

I had gotten this book from a book club because I liked the title. It turns out to be a book about a guy named michael who's really excited about valentines day and is making valentines for the neighborhood kids and a special valentines day box. But after a minor accident on the way to school causing him to lose all his work, his class is discussing things about the month of feburary including groundhogs day, black history month, valentines day and so forth. He's eager to give all the answers but he keeps yelling them out and losing out on getting to make the valentine box for the class. So he goes home and writes mean valentines and then decides to have a valentine party where he would invite his friends over so they can make valentines. But he took matters into his own hands again. He assigned each friend to do a certain task instead of letting them make valentines on their own and his bossiness made them all mad at him and stuff but in the end it all worked out and valentines day turned out to be nice

on a side plot, michael's sister donna was kicked out of college for not having high grades and they talk about it every now and then at the end after helping michael out when he wasn't getting along with his friends at the valentine party, she realizes she wants to get into teaching and will try to start a career in that field

My 5, 7 and 9 year old daughters continue to love the series. You have to be careful though this time. Even though the books are slightly adapted for the US market the week in this series still begins with Monday as typical in Europe. Sarah the Sunday Fairy is the last of this group of seven books.

Susie Day's SERAFINA67 *URGENTLY REQUIRES LIFE* is a hilarious and intimate peek about being a British teenage girl, which besides the weird slang is strikingly familiar to being an American teen. It takes place over approximately four months and is entirely composed of Serafina67's blog and accompanying comments. (Note: There is a glossary in the back with definitions to weird English slang. Don't be like me and discover it after you've finished reading.)

Serafina67 is a fifteen-year-old girl who lives with her mum and visits her dad on weekends. She has a witch under her skin that makes her act terribly sometimes and has made a resolution to be accomplished on April 22nd (blog starts on Christmas) to be happy. On the way, she is helped and hindered by her real and blog friends, Crazy Pete the therapist, her parents (and their significant others), and, of course, her blog.

It's hard to describe Serafina, because she's very full-fleshed and complicated. She can be bouncing off the walls and wonderfully excited about her VTN (Very Thrilling Novel) at the beginning of one day and feel fat, miserable, and prone to chocolate by mid-afternoon. And even when she's at her lowest, she finds humorous ways to unload it onto her readers. She often summarizes horrible events with hilarious but appropriate imaginary dialogue, but one of my favorite moments is when she doesn't feel up to posting and hence composes a blog post entirely in haiku and her friends comment accordingly.

This book reminded me a lot of Stephen Chbosky's epistolary novel THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, not only because of its content, but also because it feels almost interactive. As I read the posts and the character's reactions, I realized that the format was really cool because it's a mixture between first person (Serafina) and third person (various comments). It was also a neat blur between the privacy of a journal and the public-ness of the Internet. One of Serafina's friends, Georgia Darkly, finds her by Googling "mermaid" and "anorexia."

This is a really fun read and the author, Susie Day, touches on a lot of issues -- I won't call them teen issues, because teens don't have a monopoly on being unhappy even though it sometimes feels like it -- without getting motherly, moral, or "I've-been-there" about it. And I swear that you don't even have to be(en) a teen girl to enjoy it. This book applies to anyone who has ever thought the Parents are crazy, said something they shouldn't have, or just hates their life.

Reviewed by: Natalie Tsang

As a parent of a toddler who is frustrated by reading countless rhyming books with poor meter and rhyme scheme, I found this book to be fun, droll, and extremely well-crafted. If you've been aggravated by the likes of Madeline and other books with poor rhyming, Spunky Monkeys will be a silly and easy read.

I loved it. Audrey just feels real bad for Sara.

This is a good Valentine's story. There are lots of sentences. Since it's inexpensive, it would be a good gift for children in a reading program. Our kids enjoyed reading it.

Nancy and the Clue Crew are having a ball at Farmer Fran's Barnyard Buddies. It's a really cool place where you can make your own stuffed animal pals. But somebody has started a problem between Nancy's best pals, Bess and George! There's been a nasty note planted in the pocket of one of those do-it-yourself animals, and the girls suspect each other!

Will America's favorite junior detective be able to keep her friends together, or will the trouble-maker triumph?

Young readers will adore unraveling the clues along with Nancy. Valentine's Day Secret is a cute mystery that will entice your child to read more, more, more!

This is a cute book about sharing, my 3-year-old enjoyed it and so did I. The mention of chocolate gets my daughter's attention, and she has always liked the character of Arnold in the "Kipper" series, who is drawn very similarly to Wellington pig. This book has also been released under the name "Gumboot's Chocolatey Day", I'm not sure if there was an issue with the name or if it was changed for American vs. European audiences.