Skip to main content

Review: Swimming Into Trouble

 
Julia On the Go!
Written by Angela Ahn
Illustrated by Julie Kim
Toronto: Tundra Books, 2024. Intermediate. 170 pages.

Julia loves swimming more than anything. When she's not helping her parents at their restaurant, she's at swim practice with the Vipers. She's most excited for the personal best day when she can beat her record. One day, while trying to dive to the bottom of the deep end, Julia feels a pain in her ear. It's an ear infection, which means she has to take a break from swimming. Julia will do everything she can to get back in the pool.

This is a great book with an important lesson about dealing with disappointment. We see many difficult things such has having parent's struggling to make ends meet and learning to be flexible when it's the last thing you want to do. This is a good intermediate chapter book for readers who are starting to read books with more words and less pictures. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dude, That's Rude! (Get Some Manners) by Pamela Espeland & Elizabeth Verdick

If there's one book today's kids need to read, it is Dude, That's Rude! (Get Some Manners) . The authors provide a fun format for teaching etiquette to children. They discuss proper behavior at home, at school, at other people's homes and in public places. The information is completely up-to-date with cellphone manners and netiquette included. Fun, cartoony illustrations are on practically every page giving the book great visual appeal. This book is perfect for boys and girls in the fourth grade or older. WARNING: Bodily functions are discussed.

Faces of the Moon by Bob Crelin

Faces of the Moon by Bob Crelin Illustrated by Leslie Evans Charlesburg; 2009; unpaged Faces of the Moon is a short nonfiction book that describes the different phases of the moon and why the moon appears like it does on certain nights. This book is short and sweet so even the youngest of moon lovers will enjoy it. The layout is simplistic and easy to follow. I don’t know much about the moon so I found it very interesting.

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...