Anya wouldn’t read chapter books. Not even one about Spirit, and she’d almost eat mushrooms if they had Spirit on them. The books, she would tell me, are boring. Which is odd since (1) she’s not read it … so how would she know it is boring!?! and (2) it’s Spirit. She’ll watch the same episode of Spirit a dozen times without finding it boring, how in the world is a book based on the show prejudged as boring?

The funniest thing, though, is the ’emerging reader’ Spirit book? She tore through that. It was the longer chapter book format she objected to. Turns out the elementary school wouldn’t let K kids take out chapter books because they were too long/involved/hard, and the way they communicated this got translated to “chapter books are boring and hard” in my daughter’s head. We had a bunch of free books available from this Kellogg’s Feeding Reading promotion — had to use them by November, so I randomly picked a bunch of books from their site. One of which was this Lucy and Andy Neanderthal graphic novel. She absolutely loved the thing — read it over and over. And asked for the other two books in the series. Totally! Except I didn’t want to pay 15$ for the hard cover book 2 or 3. A quick search yielded an outlet site that had the hard cover books for 3$ each. Book Outlet has a referral – 10$ off your first order of 25$ or more (and I get a bonus 10$, which does not negate the fact they’ve got awesome prices) … I got a few books for myself to hit the ‘free shipping’ level. Anya has been reading the three Neanderthal books in cycle since they’ve arrived.