We found this book on the new juvenile fiction shelf at our local library and decided to give it a try. This was actually the book that sparked this blog because J read it that very same day and I really had no concept of what the story was about or how it was written.
The book starts off fabulously. Stella is a third grader who wants to be a writer. In fact, the book is written as her autobiography. The book is very inviting to young readers with nice illustrations and a big, clean font.
J’s synopsis of the story is that Stella’s family owns a candy store. She is a big sister and her mom is going to have another baby. Stella wants to change her name because a boy in her class calls her “Smella.” That’s not a nice name. Her friends tried doing candy names. They all decided their own names were better because it was too hard to remember the new names.
That’s about as deep as the story gets. Stella wants a new name because of the awful nickname and because she is jealous of her younger sister who gets to have a nickname. After she learns that her parents picked out her name for good reasons, she realizes that it isn’t such a bad name after all.
I don’t have anything negative to say about the book, but it also isn’t one that I would necessarily run out to find additional books from the series. I think that J feels the same way. I think reading some good picture books is better then this one and we can save the longer books for something with a little more depth.