Heidi Heckelbeck 5 – Heidi Heckelbeck Gets Glasses

Wanda Coven's Heidi Heckelbeck Gets Glasses is a school story for 6 year olds about wanting something you don't actually need.

What happens

It's the fifth Heidi Heckelbeck book, and the catalogue title says so, though you can start here without any trouble.

Heidi's friend Lucy walks into class wearing brand-new glasses with pink sparkly flowers on the sides, and the whole room crowds round her. They make you look smart. They make you look hip. Lucy gets picked to read her poem out loud. Lucy gets her picture drawn and pinned on the art room wall.

Heidi watches all this and comes to a decision. She wants a look of her own. Who hasn't wanted the exact thing that got somebody else all the attention?

Her mum says no, quite firmly, because glasses are for people who need them. So Heidi sets about needing them. She asks the teacher to write bigger. She reads "car" for cat and "nap" for nip while everyone giggles. A note goes home. There's an eye test at the optician's, and Heidi answers every question the wrong way round, saying better when it's worse and worse when it's better.

And it works! She picks out black frames with glitter set in the plastic, like gems in a rock, and she can't see a thing through them.

What follows is the best part. An ice cream she can't read the menu for and doesn't want. Her little brother's cone squashed into his nose. Her grand entrance at school, which nobody notices until she falls over a chair. A painting of a bowl of fruit that comes out as red bananas and purple apples.

Your reader will see all of this coming long before Heidi does, which is exactly the pleasure of it.

There's magic in the series, and it's here in the background. Heidi's a witch, and on Saturdays her aunt Trudy teaches her spells. Mostly though this one is school, brothers and being cross with yourself.

Nothing in it needs a warning. Melanie is the sort of classmate who says "Watch where you're going, weirdo" and then compliments your sparkles in the same breath, which is about as sharp as it gets.

The American-isms sit right on the surface. Mom rather than Mum, an eye doctor rather than an optician, and an ice cream flavour called Moose Tracks.

What to read next

If Heidi suits, there's Heidi Heckelbeck and the Cookie Contest as well. The first book in the series isn't here, so that one isn't the start, but it stands on its own perfectly well. Heidi enters the school cookie contest, has never baked anything by herself and flatly refuses to let her brother be the taste-tester.