By Marissa Moss
The whole book looks like a real black-and-white composition notebook, handwritten and doodled by a nine-year-old who just moved across the country.
Amelia gets a black marbled notebook and fills it the way a child really fills one: cramped handwriting, arrows pointing everywhere, little drawings labeled with jokes. She's just moved to a new town, she misses her best friend Nadia back home, and her big sister Cleo won't leave her alone. There's no big plot to speak of. It's mostly the small stuff of a new place and an old friend she can't stop thinking about.
It's short, the pages look handmade, and every one is crowded with doodles, so a child who freezes at a wall of text always has somewhere for their eyes to land. There's real feeling under the funny bits, too: the ache of leaving a best friend behind, told at a size a young or tender child can hold. If your child found Wimpy Kid a bit loud or a bit old, this is the doodle-diary that fits.