The Short But Brilliant Career Of Lucas Weed product reviews

The Short But Brilliant Career Of Lucas Weed, by Chrissie Walker is great book for children to read and my 9 year old son really enjoyed reading this book. He started reading the book when we received it and would read a chapter or two at a time, he said he liked this and he said the chapters were not too long either. He also mentioned he liked how the pages were not all the same; every second or third page had a different background like triangle boarder. He said this kept him entertained in the book more so.

He also liked how certain words now and again were slightly bigger or different font and said this also captured him to keep reading. He said he found this book ok to use and was only a couple of hard words in the book he would get stuck with but was able to sound it out or guess it so it flowed with the sentence structure.

He said he will be passing this book onto his cousin who is also 9 to read and said he thinks he would enjoy as well. My son is the school library monitor and is really into his books at the moments so when he finds a good one he likes he talks about it all the time and this book must have really captured him as he read it a lot faster than he has other books. He needs to be in the mood to read, but he found the time and sat quietly reading. He would even come into my room at 6.00am to wake me up to ask if he could read his book with the light on, of course I said yes as that's a nice thing to hear at 6.00am besides the 'mum can I go on the iPad'. Anything that gets children of the devices and reading is a positive in my books.

My 9 year old daughter loves books and can sit down and read a couple in a day when she sets her mind to it! Although she is open to reading different genres she does get obsessed with certain types of books so I am always on the lookout for something different to pique her interest. The Short but Brilliant Career of Lucas Weed looked like an entertaining read and after seeing an illustration of a boy holding a frog and about to put it in a bag, my daughter couldn't wait to get her hands on it.

The book is 221 pages long and has twenty chapters. The spacing between lines is good and the font is sans serif so is nice and 'clean' and easy to read. There are certain words and phrases that are highlighted by being enlarged, in a different font or in bold to help break up the text. I would say that this would ideally be aimed at primary and intermediate school level pupils and even though the main character is a boy, my daughter really enjoyed the book so the humour appeals to both boys and girls. My daughter said she could relate to Lucas Weed and some of the things that happened to him.

The book touches on bullying and pranks with lots of silly stuff going on to make the reader laugh. The narration is from Lucas Weed's perspective and the action and thought processes of the characters help to keep the reader interested. This is Chrissie Walkers first children's novel and it has justifiably won The Tom Fitzgibbon Award for 2017. An entertaining kids book!