Marissa Moss

My 5th grader is a big fan of the Amelia books, and Moss has continued these until Amelia is in 7th grade. These have been around for a while, and are sort of proto graphic novels. Not too bad, and I did enjoy the way they were done like notebooks (N.B. Not like a blog, although I have a fear that this is not far off!) with illustrations about all of the things that Amelia does.

Another thing 5th grader liked was the graphic novel version of Ann M. Martin's The Babysitters' Club. I don't think I have any of the original novels, since many were paperbacks and if I had them they ave fallen apart, but the story on the one I read was good and appeals to students in several ways-- the girls are portrayed as responsible, independent, and a central theme is usually misunderstanding between friends and how they mend their differences.

A book that I took out as a treat for myself was Cathy Hopkins' From Geek to Goddess, for the Zodiac Girls series. Hopkins has a great series in Mates, Dates, as well as one for older girls, but I wasn't keen aout this latest one. Gemma goes off to an exclusive boarding school (clearly English, but scrubbed of references so it could have been in the US) where she does not fit in. There are clear overtones that gods and goddesses are running around the place, and she gets picked to have a makeover so that she is more socially successful. The plot was hard to follow, I didn't like the characters, and the mythological link was not sufficient to interest fans of Rick Riordan, etc. It's interesting to see that there is so much interest in mythology now that books that are not particularly well done are being published.