Sofia is a 10-year-old brilliant reader who aspires to be a book reviewer, who started with us when she was 8 years old. On select Saturdays, Sofia shares her favorite books with kids! She is one of the most well-read elementary schoolers that we know, so she is highly qualified for this role!
Dear readers,
I present to you…The Friendship War by Andrew Clements! This is a definite must-read! You might have heard of Frindle by the same author and maybe even read it and thought it was good but I must say this book is even better than Frindle! This book would make an amazing read aloud story! It is not extremely long and it’s super interesting! I definitely recommend this book! This book is for ages 8-12!
Grace has an addiction to collecting things. She has all types of things strewn all over her room. When her grandpa invites her over for the summer, she gets to see his old mill that he just bought. He lets Grace explore inside of it and the mill is pretty run down because it hasn’t been lived in for 15 years. Her grandpa explains that the mill used to be many different things over the years. While exploring, she finds a closet full of big boxes that are filled with buttons! She suddenly feels an itching to have them and asks her grandpa if he can ship her all of the boxes. He agrees, laughing a little because his granddaughter wants to keep buckets of buttons. Just then Grace makes a decision to keep all of her buttons a secret from everybody outside of her family.
When school starts up again Grace continues to keep the secret from everybody, even her best friend! On that first day of school, her teacher talks about social studies and she volunteers to share some of her pictures and objects with her classmates that she collected from the mill. Later that day at lunch, her best friend, Ellie, suggests that everybody brings as many buttons to lunch as they can and they will compare who has the most buttons. Everybody agrees and Grace is excited because she knows she is going to win with her 24 boxes full of buttons that nobody knows about! When she gets home she fills five plastic baggies with buttons and stuffs them into her backpack. At lunch she decides only to bring one plastic baggie to the lunch table. Everybody shows off their buttons at the lunch table and some other kids come to watch around the table. Grace lets everybody take at most six of the buttons she has on her tray.
When she comes back to school the next day, she discovers that there is a button fad! People are trading buttons at her school like crazy and trading button jewelry and other button-made things. Grace and Ellie find somebody who is willing to trade a beautiful button and Ellie offers one of her button bracelets and Grace offers some really special buttons. Grace ends up getting the button and Ellie gets really mad. So mad that she doesn’t want to be friends anymore! To read more about this one of a kind tale, read the book!
I love this book because it is such a quick and fun read! Even as a 10-year-old, this book taught me some things and I think that this book should be a part of everybody’s life! This is a really amazing book! Another thing that is just nice about this book is that it is short. It has 168 pages and makes for a quick read. That is probably why I would recommend it highly for a read aloud book! As a reader who reads books that usually fall under the 250-600 page category, it is good to read a short story once in a while! Have fun reading the book!
**Thanks so much, Sofia! We love a good read-aloud!**
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