Thea Stilton and the Dancing Shadows product reviews

My 6Year old daughter loves to dance and sing and when I was offered this to review for her I took the opportunity to read this to her as finding books to read to her can be challenging with the fact we have read what she has in her room.

Right from the first moment we picked this book up and she had seen the cover she fell in love with the images. Once we started to read a few chapters a night she started to fall in love with the characters and story line. She also felt sad when I wasn't there to read to her those odd nights and missed her friends in the book.

My daughter had never really been too much into reading and to my surprise, having this book she kept reading it herself without us asking her to. She loved this book and keeps asking me if we can get her the other books in the series. I loved the fact that with this book it wasn't just reading it was also learning with the added information about the city and their sites. Also finding that some words were colourful was great and both me and my daughter loved this as well.

My daughters response was:
"I love the colourful images of the Thea sisters and their amazing friends and their cloths. I found this book exciting and love the ballet story too"

My four year old and I have been enjoying reading Geronimo Stilton books and initially I made the mistake of discounting the Thea Stilton books for him. I am glad that I took a second look at them when I saw this book up for review. It seems silly really, but my at first reaction I thought of it as more aimed towards girls. My four year old got into this book just like he has done with the Geronimo Stilton books.

We loved the now familiar writing style and way of highlighting words on the page using a variety of fonts and colours. There language used in the book is rich and interesting to read. My son enjoyed working out which character was which in the illustrations. He kept wanting to turn back the pages to work out who was who.

The mix of ballet, dancers and a mystery storyline, made for good reading for both my son and me. I liked the snippets at the bottom of some of the pages that explained some of the ballet terminology to those of us who have very little knowledge of ballet. The clues were also fun to follow along with to try and work out who the baddies were.

The goal was to read a chapter a night, but there were many night when both my son and I were so engrossed in the story that we had to keep reading - sometimes up to four chapters in a night.

Miss Six is a little dancer so I thought that this Thea Stilton adventure would especially appeal to her. At 161 pages (the Geronimo Stilton adventures are closer to 100 pages) it is a decent sized chapter book for her reading level so possibly a little advanced for her and perhaps better suited to ages 7 years and up. Miss Six does really enjoy the Thea Stilton series however and she has enjoyed this book though obviously needed to read it over a period of sittings. Her sum up of this was that it was neat and she really enjoyed it and can she please keep it to read it again. So that gets full marks from the intended audience.

What I like about these books is that you can just read a chapter or two an evening. As with others in this series Thea Stilton and the Dancing Shadows includes all the usual formula that makes these books such a success. Lots of informative little boxes with information about dancing and different ballet terms etc. A little detective thread where you have to work out the plot and who is involved to solve the mystery and of course lots of beautiful colour illustration's and crazy formed and coloured text.

Yet another lovely story with the Thea Sisters and their lovely uplifting adventures showcasing the importance of friendship and girl power and being kind, supportive and just. A brilliant addition to any budding young readers library.

This was such a sweet read for young girls my 11 year old thoroughly enjoyed it and after reading it tonight I enjoyed it too. For the past week I have wondered why my girl has had this sudden obsession with wanting to start ballet classes and after reading this book I can see where that sudden interest has come from.

It had a nice story line where the Thea Sisters had to solve the mystery of why the dance group "Mice for Dance" kept winning all the prestigious dance competitions and how they were managing to fix the competitions so they could win. This involved them going to Milan for the La Scala Ballet competition.

The book gave away so much information about the various opera houses throughout the world where great Ballets where held and also about Ballet itself so as well as being a nice non fiction read you learnt something about the history of Ballet and some general knowledge about countries.

I liked how on several pages there would be a footnote that highlighted a key part in the story such as when they had found a new suspect or something suspicious had happened. I really enjoyed this story and it had a nice ending. Now I am left with an 11 year old girl who thinks joining Ballet is a must!!