Skip to main content

Sparkly New Friends



Sparkly New Friends (Part of the new Unicorn and Yeti Series)
By Heather Ayris Burnell
Illustrated by Hazel Quintanilla
Acorn, Scholastic, 2019. 58 p.

So this book actually comes out tomorrow—but I LOVED this new series so much when I first saw it as an advanced reading copy I had to tell you about it! In this new series Unicorn is flying over a snowy landscape and is amazed at how sparkly everything is. Yeti is looking up at the sky when something sparkly flies by—Unicorn. It turns out that Unicorn and Yeti both love sparkles. They become good friends and have other adventures together. The book is made up of a lot of dialog (complete with color-coordinated dialog bubbles that show which character is saying what similar to the Elephant and Piggie books). Also, the book has panels—almost like a comic book—that fill in a lot of the smaller bits of the story so that when the illustrations take up the whole spread kids will know that is an extra important moment in the story. There are three chapters in the book, with a small story arc in each chapter. I strongly suspect that those young learning readers who love unicorns, yetis, or clever early chapter books will enjoy this new series. Also, those readers who love Elephant and Piggie but aren't ready for the early chapter books will enjoy this length of easy reader.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

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...

Review: Blood in the Water

Blood in the Water By Tiffany D. Jackson New York: Scholastic, 2025. Fiction. 255 pages. 12-year-old Kaylani McKinnon can't help but feel like a fish out of water. She's a Brooklyn girl spending her summer on Martha's Vineyard surrounded by wealthy family friends in their mansion. All she really wants is to stay home all summer where she her incarcerated father can easily reach her, and she can keep working to find ways to prove him innocent of fraud and embezzlement. Despite her protests, she finds herself on the island with the snooty granddaughters of her host. Soon after Kaylani's arrival, a popular teen boy is found murdered and she decides to conduct her own investigation. As she tries to discover what happened to Chadwick Cooper, Kaylani finds that not everything on Martha's Vineyard is as perfect as it appears. Thrillers for middle grade readers can be hard to find, but Tiffany D. Jackson succeeds in her first middle grade novel. A quick moving plot, tight d...

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.