In this delightful follow up to Maddie Makes a Movie, I loved the pacing and excitement in this ongoing tale about ten-year-old Maddie. As she hatches scheme after scheme to make money to cover the cost of a friend’s broken chandelier, the unfortunate outcomes and delicious feeling of barely controlled chaos drives the story forward.
The author, whose writing is even better than her first Maddie book, does a terrific job of explaining the children’s crazy stunts (it doesn’t hurt that the father in the book is a stuntman, so we get an inside look into the film industry). But, in case there is any doubt in the reader’s mind, there are some wonderful illustrations that leave no doubt as to Maddie’s often catastrophic schemes. The book also includes some lovely teaching moments without coming off as preachy or taking you out of the story.
In reading both books in Ms. Garrett’s series, one can tell she has the ability to get inside the mind of a lovable but precocious ten-year-old. As Maddie often says when she dreams up another of her hair brain schemes: “What could go wrong?” Indeed!