My six-year-old daughter is far from a girly girl. She’s all about the color blue, bumper cars and flesh-eating dinosaurs.
And did I mention she despises the color pink? The kid won’t even down a glass of strawberry lemonade because she thinks the sweet beverage is too “grody girly.”
Fortunately, my anti-girl loves reading more than she hates her God-given gender.
In fact, “love” may be an understatement. My daughter absolutely devours books. Her kindergarten admission exam revealed that she was reading at a second grade level, but that was a year ago. These days I would say she’s well past second grade and can easily hold her own with books designed for fourth graders.
Given her advanced reading ability and her distaste for the color pink, you’d never believe that one of her favorite books of the summer is Pinkalicious: Tickled Pink.
The latest book in the Pinkalicious series is funnier than ever. In Tickled Pink our young rosy-hued-loving heroine is challenged to a “laugh-off” with drably dressed Tiffany. Sporting a scratchy-looking black ensemble, Tiffany sees green after stumbling upon Pinkalicious cracking up a crowd of friends with jokes she learned from a borrowed book. Tiffany puts the pressure on Pink to come up with a unique joke or else face preadolescent ridicule befitting of a chewed up wad of unwanted cotton candy… oh wait, that’s a scene from Mean Girls. Anywhoo, back to the book; it ends on a happy note while punctuating a worthwhile moral, as all Victoria Kann books do. (We’re also fans of Purplicious and Goldilicious.)
If you are looking for a breezy summer read for your little one, I would highly recommend Pinkalicious: Tickled Pink. It was a super simple book for my daughter. Maybe too simple, but hey, it’s summer. She can work on War and Peace in September.
I wouldn’t consider Tickled Pink a HarperCollins children’s classic, but it kept my joke-loving daughter amused long enough for me to make lunch. Plus, she had a blast sharing some of Pinkalicious’ jokes with grandma and grandpa and her riddle repertoire now includes more than just: “What do you call cheese that isn’t yours? Nacho cheese!”
Just because school’s out for the summer doesn’t mean your kids should take a break from reading. If you have a Kann fan in your home, then mix up a batch of pink lemonade, slide under a shady tree and laugh out loud reading Tickled Pink.