By Rebecca Elliott
A unicorn keeps a week of diary entries at a magical forest school — a first chapter book for a child who's only just started reading alone.
Bo Tinseltail is a Wish Unicorn, which means Bo gets to grant one wish a week, and goes to Sparklegrove School where every unicorn has a different magic power. Bo has plenty of friends but wants one best friend. Then Sunny Huckleberry shows up, new to the forest and not yet sure what his own power is. All the unicorns are trying to earn a patch by using their magic to help someone, so Bo sets out to help Sunny. When Sunny figures that out, he's hurt: he decides Bo only befriended him to win the badge, and the two fall out. They make up a chapter or two later, and Sunny works out his power on his own. The whole book is one week of diary entries with a full-color picture on every page.
If your child has landed on unicorns, this is where it starts paying you back, because they can read this one themselves. Scholastic's Branches line is built for the child who just came off picture books and panics at a wall of text: big type, a color picture on every single page, chapters that take about three minutes each. Wrap that around unicorns with named magic powers and a friendship that goes wrong and gets fixed, and a child who's been refusing to read alone may well be reading alone by the end of the week. The formula repeats across more than a dozen books, so once Bo's week makes sense, the next one does too. That's a good long stretch of bedtimes handled.