What Zola Did on Wednesday

This little series is just truly delightful and I know that little readers must love being able to make connections with their own family, friends, schools and communities . . . Your newly independent readers both boys and girls will just adore these stories and they would make fabulous read-alouds for either classroom teachers or teacher-librarians paired with some activities and action plans. Highly recommended for little readers from around six years upwards.

Sue Warren, Just So Stories

This vibrant world shows kids that everyone is different, and that these differences are everywhere. This powerful and lovely message is what we need these days . . . in this lovely and heartfelt diverse series that shows it is the content of your character that is just as important as how you identify, and that together, these aspects make you who you are. This is the third book in the series that celebrates diversity, family, dogs, knitting and gardens, and how these simple things can bring a community together. These are stories that can be read to younger readers, or read alone, or used to help younger readers build their reading and comprehension confidence. It shows that caring about your community will eventually extend to helping and caring about the wider world . . . Good literature like this celebrates diversity, and how people’s differences are powerful and important, and these differences are what make life interesting and can also bring people together and unite them as a community. A great read for readers aged six and over.

The Book Muse

This is the third in this series about Zola and her friends – a diverse group of kids who could live in any neighbourhood, anywhere. Their everyday lives are just like those of the readers who can see themselves, understand and relate to the friends, while being a stepping stone for consolidating their new reading skills with a solid text combined with lots of illustrations, short chapters and humour. Because the characters and events are so common, the stories could be the inspiration for children to get together in ways they did in previous generations and be the foundation blocks of a new community as we find new ways to get together in these COVID times. Perhaps our new lives may not be so frantic that we don't have time for the simpler pleasures of yesteryear. There are seven stories in the series altogether and each one is as entertaining as the others.

Barbara Braxton