The Fix-It Friends 5 – Eyes on the Prize

Nicole C. Kear's Eyes on the Prize is the fifth Fix-It Friends book, a school story for 6 year olds about a girl who has never won a single trophy.

What happens

Veronica Conti loves contests. Staring contests, arm-wrestling contests, eating contests. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, and it's fun either way.

But it's better when you win. And much better when there's a trophy.

Here's her problem. Everyone else in the family has one. Her brother Jude has so many that Dad put up a second shelf for the overflow. Then her two-year-old sister comes home from nursery with a gold medal that has a picture of a toilet on it.

A medal for going to the toilet? Veronica has been roughly sixteen thousand times, by Jude's maths, and has nothing to show for it.

So when school announces its 100 Days contest, she decides the trophy is hers. She just has to survive her group. Cora and Minnie are her two closest friends, which is perfect. The fourth name on the list is Matthew Sawyer, who has driven her bonkers for three years running.

Reading it feels like being talked at, at top speed, by a seven-year-old with opinions. Veronica numbers her problems. She lists the things she's banned from doing in her dad's building (filming horror films in the staircase is number three). She gasps a lot, because gasping makes people pay attention.

She's also completely sure she's right, and that's where the jokes live. She stamps on a bug to be helpful and can't see why Matt is furious. She collects ninety-eight signatures and assumes anyone could manage the last two.

If you've got a child who keeps a running tally of what everyone else has been given, a lot of this will ring true. Fairness is an ENORMOUS subject when you're seven.

There's always a worry running under the jokes here, because the Fix-It Friends help other children sort their problems out. This time it's wanting something badly and being stuck with someone you can't stand. Nothing in it is frightening, and Matthew Sawyer turns out to be more than a pebble in Veronica's shoe, which is the bit that might start a conversation at bedtime.

What to read next

If your reader wants to know how the group got started, the first Fix-It Friends book is in the library too. Veronica is seven in that one, and her first client is a girl who won't go out to play because she's terrified of bugs.