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Jodi Carmichael's The Unique Lou Fox is a warm, funny school story for 9 year olds about a girl with huge plans and a very hard time with spelling.
Her full name is Louisa Elizabeth Fitzhenry-O'Shaughnessy. That's thirty-six letters, which is a LOT when you're dyslexic. So she'd much rather be Lou Fox, the name she plans to use when she's a famous playwright. (If the plays flop, the backup plan is the circus. She's very bendy.)
Lou is ten and in fifth grade. Every morning starts brilliantly, stretching under the oak tree with her best friends Lexie and Nakessa. Then school begins and it all goes downhill.
She gets four out of ten in spelling. She drifts off out of the window halfway through a lesson (she has ADHD too). And her teacher, Mrs Snyder, seems to notice every single thing. Lou is convinced she's a Shadow Phantom.
One bad day, it all boils over. Lou shouts something truly awful at Mrs Snyder in front of the whole class and runs out of school. Who hasn't said something in anger they wished they could take straight back?
The best part is being inside Lou's head. She collects "five-dollar words" and loves saying them slowly, syllable by syllable. Her friends are lovely too. Nakessa turns everything into a song and Lexie always shares her sweets.
It gets how frustrating school can feel when your brain works differently. Lou studied all weekend and still got words wrong, and never the same ones twice. That feeling of trying SO hard is very real. There's a kind head teacher who helps her spot the warning signs before she explodes, and a talking computer program that types her plays for her.
There's big news at home too. Lou is finally getting a baby brother or sister! Her mum has been acting strangely for days (white bread and shop-bought biscuits, in their house?), and now it all makes sense.
If your reader has ever felt like the teacher is out to get them, they'll recognise a lot of this. And a child who finds reading tricky might see a bit of themselves in Lou.
It's set in Winnipeg, so expect a few North American words like recess and fifth grade.
If Lou's playwriting goes down well, try The Capybara Conspiracy, about another girl who writes plays, told as if the whole thing is a play.
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