Heidi Heckelbeck 12 – Heidi Heckelbeck Gets the Sniffles

Heidi Heckelbeck Gets the Sniffles by Wanda Coven is a short chapter book for 6 year olds about a girl who is absolutely fine, thank you, and definitely not ill.

What happens

Heidi has been looking forward to Brewster's Fall Festival for ages. There's a haunted barn, a hay bale maze, a petting zoo and a best friend to go round it all with. So when she starts sneezing over a pile of raked leaves, she decides to ignore it.

She ignores it through dinner. She ignores it through a glass of orange juice and a homemade remedy of honey and cider vinegar that smells appalling. She does ten jumping jacks at the breakfast table to prove how well she is, while her head pounds.

Any parent who has watched a child insist they're fine will enjoy this enormously.

Here's the thing about Heidi though. She's a witch, and she keeps a Book of Spells under her bed, and there's a whole chapter in it on health. There's even one called No More Sickness. You can probably guess that she reaches for it. You can probably also guess it doesn't go to plan (the frog in her throat is not a figure of speech).

The writing is short and bouncy and full of sound effects, which makes this a good one for a reader just getting going on their own. The chapters are tiny and most of the page is dialogue.

Her little brother Henry is a joy, wandering about in a fake moustache and poking her in the ribs with a plastic sword. There's a rival at school too, Melanie, who Heidi's mum privately refers to as Smell-a-nie.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing that the story puts a child in bed feeling genuinely rotten and crying about what she's missing. It's brief and her mum is right there with her, but a tender reader may feel it.

What to read next

This is book twelve and that hardly matters, because Heidi lets a newcomer in on her secret as she goes. The library doesn't have the first one, so if you'd rather start further back, try Heidi Heckelbeck and the Cookie Contest. Heidi signs up for the school baking competition with the family chocolate chunk recipe and the strong temptation to improve on it.