27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great story, cute illustrations, August 18, 2007
Just Grace is a fun and funny book about a girl named Grace. She gets her nickname because there are four girls in her class all named Grace. As the teacher was calling them "Grace (insert last initial here)", Grace asked if she could be called just Grace. So the teacher did.
Grace's super power is empathy. When I read this, I just knew I'd love this story. Grace has also got talent. When she tries to take her mind off of something that's bothering her, she draws what she calls Not-So-Super comics. Although you always kind of know that Grace's intentions are good, she does end up making mistakes and getting in some scrapes.
Grace ends up being an unlikely hero (just like the name of her favorite TV show 'Unlikely Heroes'). She devises a plan to cheer up her neighbor because her superpower, after all, is empathy. When none of it goes as expected, Grace works hard to set everything right.
I enjoyed Just Grace immensely. The story was well told. The illustrations were wonderful and whimsical too. Great book!!
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A True Gem, August 27, 2008
I cannot do justice describing the charms of Just Grace. My 9 year old niece was reading it last summer and I picked it up to see what it was like. My children are 3 and 5 and adore Charise's books and I wanted to see what her "big kid" books had to offer. I was instantly charmed by Grace and had to finish the book. It is very funny and the story keeps you interested to very end. I love that a book geared toward 9-12 year old girls has a heroine whose super power is empathy. Grace is kind and feels for others, but is a realistic regular girl who knows to do the right thing, even if she would rather not sometimes. My 5 year old is a reader and she just read the book and cannot wait to move on to the others. It is such a nice change of pace for books in this demographic. My daughters love Junie B. Jones, but my husband gets exhausted correcting the grammar as he goes, as he cannot bear to read them as written. No such problems with the Just Grace series.
These are lovely, funny, charming books that should be in every book lover's collection.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So charming and funny, February 8, 2010
As a family, we were first introduced to the Just Grace series with the fifth book. My daughter is six and has been brought up with tons of books, so she is now becoming more interested in chapter books with deeper story lines. When we hit upon a truly worthy work of children's literature, it's like magic. The two books of the Just Grace series that we have read thus far certainly fit that framework. I'm so enamored of them that I went out and bought the other three books for my daughter. We now have the complete series, and my husband and I look as forward to reading these at bedtime story time as my daughter does.
This book introduces us to the character of Grace, who has the unfortunate problem of sharing her name with three other girls in her class. A misunderstanding leads to her being labeled "Just Grace" and, much to her dismay, this moniker sticks. Harper really does a wonderful job here of capturing how annoyed and bothered Grace is by this--and who wouldn't be? The nickname makes Grace sound like some run-of-the-mill girl when she is anything but.
One of the wonderful things that Harper does in this series is to introduce some pretty big vocabulary words. Whenever she does so, she had Grace provide the reader with an explanation that sounds so sincere, it's hard not to smile. Grace picks these words up from her parents and defines them in this context, which makes us adults sound a little pompous at times.
In fact, the real charm of the series is how Grace pokes some fun at adults. She's not a disrespectful child at all, but my husband and I could recognize so much of ourselves in Grace's descriptions of adults. It's good for us all to stop and remember what it was like to be young and to look at the world through a young person's eyes. There were times when we laughed out loud because we recognized our own parenting in the descriptions of how Grace's parents reacted to certain situations.
As for Grace herself, she is basically a kind, caring young lady who is quite clever. She is by no means perfect, however. She unfairly judges her next-door neighbor and Sammy Stringer, a boy from her class who has an unfortunate habit of making a napkin out of his shirt. It is Grace's growth that makes the story the charmer it is. She owns up to making mistakes and then does her best to try to correct them.
The themes in the book really speak to my daughter. Like Grace, she is a young girl trying to figure out how to navigate her way through a world that it often bewildering to her. Grace's resilience and introspection are wonderful traits for a child. After reading the book, we often discussed Grace's reactions, creating the perfect parenting moments: when you reach your child at their level and teach them something in an entertaining way without having to lecture.
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