Read The Sisters 8 1 – Annie’s Adventures free in the Little Reads app.
Sister's 8 - Annie's Adventures by Lauren Baratz-Logsted is an adventure for 6 year olds about eight sisters who suddenly find themselves running the house on their own.
The Huit girls are octuplets. On the last night of the year, one parent goes out to the woodshed for logs and the other goes off to pour drinks. Neither comes back.
It takes the girls a good twenty minutes to notice, which tells you a fair bit about them.
All eight of them tell the story together as "we", and they interrupt each other the whole way through. Georgia sneers. Petal is frightened of everything, including the spiders in the basement. Rebecca keeps chipping in with "Or else they're dead" until somebody tells her off.
Annie is the eldest and has decided this puts her in charge. Her first act as head of the household is to take the silver spear off the suit of armour in the drawing room and carry it round the house with her. Insurance, she calls it.
The house itself is great fun. There's a robot called Betty who was built to do the dusting and instead puts the duster on her own head. There's a talking fridge that thinks the girls are too skinny. There are eight grey and white cats, one each.
Then one of the stones in the wall is sticking out, and it has never stuck out before. Behind it is a note. It tells the sisters that they each have a power and a gift, that they don't know about either yet, and that finding them both is how they'll learn what happened to their parents.
Eight girls, eight powers, eight gifts. You can see where the series is going.
It's very funny, which you might not expect. The girls squabble their way through a frightening night and stay extremely practical about it. The cats still want feeding. Somebody has to ring the electricity company, and Annie does it in an impression of her dad that comes out weirdly British.
The obvious thing to weigh up. The parents go missing on page one, and the possibility that they're dead gets said out loud more than once, by a sister who rather enjoys saying it. Two of the younger girls cry about it.
If your child gets wobbly about parents going away, that will be a lot to take. If they love the idea of children left to sort everything out themselves with no grown-up telling them what to do, this is a cracking place to start.
If they take to all eight of them, The Sisters 8 - Durinda's Dangers comes next. Same house, same bickering, and a neighbour the girls are certain has stolen something of their mother's.
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