Quinny & Hopper 3 – Smart Cookies

Smart Cookies is the third Quinny & Hopper book by Adriana Brad Schanen, a school story for 8 year olds told in two completely different voices.

What happens

Quinny Bumble talks the way she runs. Everything at once, nothing left out, quite a lot of it in capitals. Hopper Grey notices things, thinks about them for a while, and usually says it about ten minutes too late.

The chapters swap between them, so your reader gets both sides of the same afternoon. That is the trick of these books and it is why they work.

Quinny's morning falls apart before school even starts. The baby will not give up her dummy. Her little sister has let the guinea pig out. She hunts Crescent through a mountain of shoes, gets kicked in the nose, misses the bus, and then sits through maths convinced next door's cat has eaten him.

Hopper's morning goes wrong more quietly. He sits on the Friendship Bench to tie a shoelace, which nobody ever does, and Victoria's friend Kaitlin sits down beside him and unfolds a scrap of paper.

It is a list. All twenty-four children in the class, in order of how clever they are. Victoria wrote it. Victoria is number one.

Quinny is number twenty-four.

Hopper shoves it behind his back when he sees Quinny coming, because he cannot bear for her to see it. Quinny sees him whispering over a secret with a girl he never talks to. Her whole day curdles.

Then the school bans biscuits and sweets at class parties, which for Quinny is more or less a declaration of war.

What I like about this one is that everybody is right and wrong at the same time. Hopper is protecting Quinny and it looks exactly like a betrayal. Kaitlin is being unkind about the list and she is also the person it hurts. Even Victoria, who is insufferable, is genuinely trying to arrange a friendship by taking Quinny ice skating.

If you've got a reader who has ever been left out of a whispered conversation, this will go straight in.

Something to weigh up first. That list lands hard. A child watches her best friend put last for being stupid, and another child calls herself dumb out loud. It is the engine of the story and it is handled properly, but a reader who quietly worries about being the least clever in their class may find it uncomfortable before it gets better.

It is an American school too, with third graders and chorus and a Friendship Bench, so expect a few questions. And although it is the third book, it stands up on its own, because the first chapter introduces everybody as it goes.

What to read next

Got a reader who takes things up as causes? Judy Moody Saves the World! is on the shelf here as well. Judy gets furious about the rain forest and her family's recycling habits and drags her entire class into doing something about it.