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: A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall

A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall By Jasmine Warga New York: Harper, 2024. Fiction. 211 pages. A painting has been stolen from the Penelope L. Brooks Museum and sixth-grader Rami Ahmed is worried he's the main suspect. His mother works at the museum as the lead custodian and Rami spends a lot of time hanging out at the museum while she works. On the day the painting went missing, the only people there were the security guard Ed, the cleaning crew, and Rami. Then, a mysterious girl appears in the museum. She floats around from room to room and only Rami can see her -- and she looks exactly like the girl from the missing painting. To prove his innocence and help figure out who the floating girl is, Rami partners up with an aspiring sleuth at school named Veda and the two dive into unexpected situations as they try to solve the mystery. This is a cozy mystery that is focused mostly on characters and ambiance and only a little on the mystery itself. Don't read this book if yo...

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: The Amazing Generation

The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World Written by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price  Illustrated by Cynthia Yuan Cheng New York: Rocky Pond Books, 2025. Informational. 226 pages.  In a kid-friendly adaptation of his best-selling book, The Anxious Generation , Jonathan Haidt teams up with Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone , to bring the power of good information directly to the hands of those that this issue affects most directly — kids on the cusp of getting their own smartphones. The book presents information about the drawbacks of having a smartphone and social media too soon in clear and easy-to-understand language, with eye-catching graphics and pop-outs. Throughout the book, quotes from real teens and young adults, called screen "rebels" by the authors, emphasize the points the authors are trying to make. Fictional characters are featured throughout in a graphic novel story, which further emphasizes the po...