Skip to main content

Like Magic

Image
By


Like Magic
Elaine Vickers
HarperCollins, 2016. 261 p.

Three girls feel unsure and lonely in Salt Lake City. Each girl ends up going to the Salt Lake City Library and meets a librarian who suggests that they each borrow a very special book on friendship. Thus begins a sweet story about how these three girls find out that they are not alone in their feelings or insecurities. Grace has lived in Salt Lake for a long while. Her best friend moved away and now her anxiety won’t allow her to speak to anyone—even though she often wants to. Jada is new to Utah. She and her father moved from New Jersey so that he could start a teaching career at a new school focused on the arts. Jada loves art—but she hates living so far away from her mother, grandmother and everything else she knows. Malia is worried about the upcoming birth of a baby sister. Her mother is on bedrest in the hospital and her father is running around trying to take care of the family business as well as his family. Malia doesn’t know if she can be a good big sister or if her parents will even care about her after this long-awaited baby will arrive.

Vickers weaves the three stories together—readers will know that eventually all three girls will become friends. It just is the only satisfactory ending we would accept. This is a good book for reading and then starting conversations about anxiety, frustrations, or other feelings that often come when life-changing events happen to young girls. Plus it shows that friendships (and libraries and librarians!) are a good way to navigate the crazy experience called life.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If You Like...KPop Demon Hunters

By
KPop Demon Hunters has been one of the most talked-about movies of the summer. If you loved this movie as much as I did, you don't want the magic (or the music) to stop. Try reading these books that touch on some of the same topics and themes as the animated hit! Brick Dust and Bones By M. R. Fournet New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2023. Fiction. 247 pages. Orphaned Marius works in the family business--as their cemetery's ghost caretaker. However, Marius also moonlights as a monster hunter in order to earn the costly Mystic currency he needs to bring his mother back from the dead. As the window to bring his mother back begins to close, Marius's exploits get more and more dangerous, and he may have set his sights on a monster too big to handle on his own. Like Mira, Marius longs for familial connection, and his work as a monster hunter will satisfy the thrill of demon hunting for fans the movie. Where's Halmoni? By Julie J. Kim Seattle, WA: Little Bigfoot, 2017. Comics. W...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: A World Without Summer

By
A World Without Summer: A Volcano Erupts, a Creature Awakens, and the Sun Goes Out Written by Nicholas Day Illustrated by Yas Imamura New York: Random House Studio, 2025. Informational. 294 pages. In 1815 on a small island in Indonesia, Mount Tambora erupted. The blast was the largest in human history, and one of the deadliest. Though it couldn't be understood at the time, the deadly blast half a world away would lead to catastrophic famine in Europe, prompt westward expansion in America, and inspire the novel Frankenstein  by Mary Shelley. The global climate disaster following the explosion also led to inventions like modern meteorology and the early invention of the bicycle. The people living at the time couldn't have seen how everything was connected, but this fast paced narrative assures that readers will. As he did in 2024's Sibert winner The Mona Lisa Vanishes, Nicholas Day does an impressive job of weaving together different historical events into one single, compell...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more