Kids love when books come in a series. Don’t believe me? Just check out the proliferation of trilogies in the last number of years. Young readers simply get hooked on a character and once they know that they like one book, they also know that they don’t have to go searching through the vast library of other options to have another book to read. I have no problem with that, but finding good series can be challenging. One that J has been devouring lately, and that E really wants to be able to read, is the EJ12: Girl Hero series by Susannah McFarlane.
EJ12 is an adventure series for young girls where the girl is the hero. The concept of the series is that young Emma Jacks is an average ten-year-old girl who just happens to also be EJ12 – “a field agent and ace code-cracker in the under-twelve division of SHINE, a secret agency that protects the world from evildoers.” As Emma Jacks, she often struggles and doubts herself, but as EJ12 she believes that she can accomplish anything. Each book features a situation that she needs to deal with in her everyday life as Emma Jacks as well as a mission that she has to solve as EJ12.
I actually found this video from Susannah McFarlane about the series and one of the things she says that I love is that “EJ is more competent than confident and she needs to trust herself a little bit more.” I also think it is awesome that she specifically wanted a book series where the girl was “hero front and center,” rather than how Hermione is a major hero in Harry Potter, but not the main focus.
In each book, EJ12 must solve various codes to solve her mission for Shine. As she explains in book 1, codes are “confusing at first because they looked like one things and then turned out to be something else…But once you understood how they worked, they were easy to handle.” Interestingly, she understands that there are similarities between codes and people, but while she can crack the codes she gets faced with for a mission, she is struggling with cracking the code of other 10 year olds.
These books are aimed at 7-10 year olds, those who have graduated from early chapter books and are ready to read something with a little more meat. I wish I had known about these books when J was younger, but even though they are like candy for her, they deal with some of the emotional issues that a girl who is about to be 10 deals with, so for that reason, they are still perfect. E will be getting to these in probably the next year, so at least that is a plus.
EJ12 is an import from Australia via the Kane Miller portion of Usborne Books & More. As you may or may not know, I am an independent consultant with Usborne Books. You can find EJ12 here. You might also consider hosting a party and earning some truly amazing books for free!
Neato! 😀