New Feature: Brooke's Reviews

My daughter, Brooke, will be 10 soon and has done a couple of reviews on my blog in the past. She has recently started reading a lot again and thinks a blog looks like a lot of fun! Since she's too young to have her own blog, I'm going to start featuring her more on mine. Every Friday she will put up a review. She has calendared it out and almost has the entire year covered.

It was hard to say no since her Judy Moody review is one of my highest viewed posts. If you haven't read that one yet, you can read it here.

To keep a good thing going, she's going to start her reviews with another Judy Moody book.

Judy Moody Goes to College, by Megan McDonald
2010, 144p
Brooke's Rating=5 Stars


It's her funniest adventure yet! A few sessions with a college-age math tutor turn Judy into a jargon-spouting polygon princess. Crucial!

Judy Moody is in a mood. Not a good mood. And definitely NOT a math mood. The substitute teacher in Class 3T thinks Judy's math skills need improving. So Judy has to start meeting with a math tutor. Does this mean flash cards? Does this mean baby games? Does this mean school on weekends? But when Judy meets her tutor — a sick-awesome college student with an uber-funky sense of style — and gets a glimpse of college life, Judy's bad math-i-tude turns into a radical glad-i-tude. Pretty soon, Judy's not only acing her math class; she's owning it. Time to say good-bye to Judy Moody, old skool third-grader, and say hello to Miss College! Small-tall upside-down backward non-fat capp with extra whip, anyone?

Judy Moody is one of my favorite books to read. She has adventures and makes me laugh. She also gives me good ideas on what to do when I'm bored.

In Judy Moody Goes to College, Judy falls behind in school, and needs to get her grades up, so her parents decide to get her a tutor. To top that she has a substitute teacher at school that she doesn’t like. Judy thinks that having a tutor means flash cards and baby stuff, and when Judy arrives she sees that her tutor is at a college. Judy gets super excited that she's at college, and Judy loves her tutor. She has fun and wants to go back.

When she goes to school she starts telling everybody about college. At recess no one wants to play with her anymore. Judy starts to let the college life take over her real life. She starts dressing different and starts using different words.

I loved this book and highly recommend it. She is funny and I love Judy Moody.

Amazon

"Sometimes I think I am Judy Moody," says Megan McDonald, author of the Judy Moody series, the Stink series, and THE SISTERS CLUB. "I'm certainly moody, like she is. Judy has a strong voice and always speaks up for herself. I like that."

For Megan McDonald, being able to speak up for herself wasn't always easy. She grew up as the youngest of five sisters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her father, an ironworker, was known to his coworkers as "Little Johnny the Storyteller." Every evening at dinner the McDonalds would gather to talk and tell stories, but Megan McDonald was barely able to get a word in edgewise. "I'm told I began to stutter," she says, leading her mother to give her a notebook so she could start "writing things down."

Critically acclaimed, the Judy Moody books have won numerous awards, ranging from a PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Best Book of the Year to an International Reading Association Children's Choice. "Judy has taken on a life of her own," the author notes, with nearly 3 million Judy Moody books in print. Interestingly, the feisty third-grader is highly popular with boys and girls, making for a strong base of fans who are among Megan McDonald's strongest incentives to keep writing, along with "too many ideas and a little chocolate." And now -- by popular demand -- Judy Moody's little brother, Stink, gets his chance to star in his own adventures! Beginning with STINK: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING KID, three more stories, and his own encyclopedia, STINK-O-PEDIA, Stink's special style comes through loud and strong -- enhanced by a series of comic strips, drawn by Stink himself, which are sprinkled throughout the first book. About the need for a book all about Stink, Megan McDonald says, "Once, while I was visiting a class full of Judy Moody readers, the kids, many with spiked hair à la Judy's little brother, chanted, 'Stink! Stink! Stink! Stink! Stink!' as I entered the room. In that moment, I knew that Stink had to have a book all his own."

More recently, Megan McDonald has recalled some of her own childhood with the warmth, humor -- and squabbles -- of three spunky sisters in THE SISTERS CLUB.

Megan McDonald and her husband live in Sebastopol, California, with two dogs, two adopted horses, and fifteen wild turkeys that like to hang out on their back porch. 

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