American Girl – The Real Z

Jen Calonita's The Real Z is a friendship story for 10 year olds, and its heroine makes films in her bedroom until she is suddenly handed a real one.

Z is Suzanne Yang, though nobody calls her that except contests and report cards. She shoots stop-motion videos with her dolls, thousands of people watch them, and her best friend Lauren builds the props out of newspaper and sticky notes.

The two of them are halfway through a gold rush video for their history homework when an email arrives. Z has been accepted into a young filmmakers' contest at a Seattle film festival. Ten minutes about her city. Six weeks. Three hundred dollars towards equipment.

Then everyone starts helping.

Her dad wants to know the deadline. Her mum, who teaches film, says a movie needs a clear story or it gets messy. Her friends want drones and panoramic camera mounts and a fashion segment. Her list gets twice as long and she still has no idea what the film is actually about.

Anyone who has ever been given a big project and immediately drowned in other people's brilliant ideas will feel this one in their stomach.

The voice is chatty and quick and full of asides. Z tells you how many photographs go into one second of stop-motion (twelve, which is more than seven hundred for a one-minute film) and how she never presses record without her purple beanie. Her dog Popcorn eats the caramel popcorn they were using as gold.

Worth flagging for the age. Z is thirteen and at middle school, and her friends are around the same. Nothing in the first chapters is beyond a ten year old, but your reader is looking up at an older girl rather than across at one.

The online side is handled better than you might expect. Z's parents watch every video before it goes up, and her dad's line about never being able to take something back once it is online is right there in chapter one. It is not a lecture. It is just how her house works.

The friendships are the warm part. Lauren hates being on camera and does it anyway. Mari has been calling her Z since they were toddlers and turns up with wardrobe suggestions. Becka and Gigi are a video call away, one of them spinning her wheelchair for the camera, the other yawning in a different time zone.

If you've got a reader who is already certain what they want to be when they grow up, try the American Girl book about Luciana. She has decided she is going to be the first girl on Mars, and she arrives at Space Camp carrying her own bags because astronauts do not need their parents to carry things.