Frantic Friend Countdown (The Secret Games of Maximus Todd)

Gr 2-5--This humorous series focuses on Max, a wiggly third grader with "super fidgets" who develops quirky strategies to control himself and navigate different situations. Max must calm himself down in a soccer game against the school bully in Big Game Jitters. In Flu Shot Fidgets, Max plays a game where he makes animal noises in order to distract himself from a visit to the doctor's office. In Frantic Friend Countdown, Max desperately wants to befriend the new kid at school and plays a game to make him say his name five times. Hyper to the Max finds Max rhyming with everyone he encounters, including his frenemy Mandy Beth. Each book is written at a second grade reading level and features kid-friendly illustrations and easy-to-read text designed for readers with dyslexia. VERDICT The series deals with the subject of Max's unnamed disability in a lighthearted, tactful way and will be entertaining to both lower and upper elementary school students.

"Frantic Friend Countdown puts simple, comic-style illustrations together with a bold, blocky typeface and a day-in-the-life narrative to stir the interest of young readers, most especially those who find other early chapter books a little too difficult to read. The overall look is similar to the "Dork Diaries", "Diary of a Wimpy Kid", or "Alvin Ho" series titles but contains much fewer words than any of them and has very simple writing. The contents page shows 11 chapters, however, and each chapter is announced with a page break and special header, modeling the structure of most grownup novels. The page-by-page design is more open and clean than, say, "Geronimo Stilton" titles, with the illustrations showcasing the object or person of interest without being distractingly detailed. Max is a cheerful, good-natured boy who tries to enjoy his daily school life while being archenemies with his neighbor Mandy Beth ? a dependable formula for school stories.

The bolded sentence within my excerpt demonstrates the oddity of the chosen typeface of the book, which is my only quibble. Varied font sizes and use of spacing emphasize important words or strong feelings within the text, an approach which may be useful for beginning readers. However, when the typeface, itself, mixes up lowercase and uppercase letters, sometimes using both within a single word, I believe it may be disconcerting for the target audience at a time when they are learning such conventions as capitalization.

Recommended."