A family birthday

Today is my eldest niece’s birthday and she is turning twelve. How the years have flown! She is a little girl (though not so little anymore) after my own heart in many ways: she loves to read, loves to draw and loves her gymnastics and athletics.

I bought her birthday presents and gave them to her when I was in Brisbane. We went to Folio books in the city one day and she was looking at Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, and my sister told me all her gym friends are reading it. But I had read Challies review and decided that I wasn’t going to be the person giving her that. I also think she is way too young for it. While she’s very bright and an advanced reader, observes things keenly (except when she is lost in her own fantasy world, when she hears and notices nothing) and understands a whole lot more than she lets on most of the time, she is also still a kid. She comes to visit and brings these friends with her:

And she likes to play with these:

I like those too. There’s plenty of time for obsessive love-sickness later on. (Karen has also written an interesting review of Twilight here.) So, in the end I bought her Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and The Graveyard Book. I hadn’t read these before and thought I probably should before I gave them to her, to make sure I wasn’t going to scare her witless (because she’s more sensitive to a good scaring than her younger sister - which is also a little like her Aunt). So I sat down to read Coraline and was completely hooked. I finished it in one evening. It’s a little scary, but in a friendly, child-like sort of way, not a terrifyingly spooky sort of way. I didn’t read The Graveyard Book, but I am looking forward to doing so one day. If you have imaginative children in their early teens looking for something to read then Coraline is worth exploring (perhaps with a little parental discussion), and I notice there is a movie coming soon too.