By Henry Winkler, Lin Oliver
Hank wants the lead in the class play, freezes at the audition, and gets handed the one part with no lines at all.
Hank Zipzer is in second grade and the class is putting on a play called Aqua Fly. Hank wants the lead. He has practiced. Then he stands up at the audition, his mind goes white, and the only thing that comes out of him is buzzing. His teacher, who is kind about it, invents a part for him instead: a bookmark. A bookmark does not speak. A bookmark stands there. Hank takes it, because what else is there. And then on the night, Nick McKelty, the boy who has spent the whole book being awful about all of this, dries up on stage in front of everybody, and the silent bookmark is the only one who can save the play.
This is the first American series printed in Dyslexie, a font drawn specifically for people with dyslexia: the b and the d are weighted along the bottom so they sit still instead of flipping, the openings on the c and the e are cut wider, the gaps between letters and between words are bigger than normal, and every capital is bold so your child can see where one sentence stops and the next starts. There is a lot of white space. So the page is doing some of the work. Underneath that, Henry Winkler is writing about a boy for whom school is hard, and Winkler was in his thirties before anyone told him he was dyslexic and that school had been hard for a reason. Your child gets the format and a boy on the page who struggles the way they struggle. That second thing is rarer than the first.