I’ve had this book on my TBR shelf forever. Thank goodness for my Adolescent Lit. Class. I’ve been searching through my TBR shelf for Middle Grade and Children’s books to read this whole month. This book just so happened to be the first book I picked up. I remember there being a huge hype around this book when I first added it to my list (back in 2011, yikes). So I was very excited to pick it up. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations.

I enjoyed the first part of this book very much. It seemed to be such a wonderful story about friendship and being in the fifth grade. There were no fantasy aspects whatsoever. I was very much in love what was happening. Unfortunately, as soon as the fantasy aspects came into play, the story became less genuine to me. I’m not quite sure if this is because of my feelings towards fantasy or if it was the book itself. To me, the fantasy aspects made everything feel fake. And yeah, I get it, fantasy is not supposed to be real, but the way it was written in this book made me feel really distanced from the characters.

Overall, this was not my favorite book. I really enjoyed the first half, but the second half just wasn’t my favorite. I do not think that I will be using this for a read aloud in my future classes.