Read The Fix-It Friends 2 – Sticks and Stones free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Nicole C. Kear's Sticks and Stones is a Fix-It Friends story for 6 year olds about a chatterbox who decides her very quiet friend needs someone to stick up for him.
Veronica Conti is seven and she's the president of a problem-solving club (her big brother Jude says they don't have a president). She talks a LOT. Her friend Noah hardly talks at all. For ages she thought he couldn't.
Then a tall boy in a bright orange Florida hoodie starts calling Noah Shorty. Noah really, really hates anything about being short. So Veronica marches straight over to sort it out.
It doesn't go to plan. J.J. turns on her instead and says her favourite jeans are dirty (they are, she wears them nearly every day). She's so embarrassed she runs off and climbs to the top of the monkey bars.
What follows is a very funny string of fixes that don't fix anything. There's a makeover from her best friend Cora, a scratchy pink polka-dot dress Veronica names Monster Dress, and a kung fu plan that nobody else thinks is a good idea.
Veronica tells the whole thing herself and she's brilliant company. She loves to gasp because it adds drama to the day. She makes lists of everything. And her little sister Pearl wants whiskers drawn on her face so she can be a rat princess!
Underneath the jokes there's a real question about teasing. Is ignoring it enough? Noah and Ezra think a poker face and letting the words bounce off will do. Jude isn't so sure, and for once Veronica agrees with him.
Who hasn't been told "it's just a joke" by someone who knew full well it wasn't funny? Your reader will probably recognise that feeling. The grown-ups aren't much help at first either, because they're busy chatting by the fence.
It's warm and silly and never preachy. A good one for any child who's ever felt stuck between keeping quiet and making things worse.
If Veronica goes down well, go back to Have No Fear, where the club takes on its very first case, a girl in a kitty-ear hat who sits very still by the fence at recess.
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