How to Be Good(ish) Book

Meet Indie Kidd, who is celebrating her 10th birthday. Or she would be celebrating if it weren't for a horrible school project. Indie's teacher loves making lists and wants the students to list their top three talents. Never mind three talents, Indie can hardly think of one. Her super-talented best friends, Soph and Fee, have quickly finished their lists. Now, there's no time to lose as the girls team up to help Indie find her special talents. She tries just about everything from hair wrapping to magic tricks. There's got to be something Indie's good at—or at least good(ish).

Publishers Weekly

Giving the Indie Kidd series a spirited start, this playfully illustrated novel introduces an earnest, energetic British girl who lives with her mother (an assistant manager at an animal rescue center) and a menagerie of pets. On her 10th birthday, Indie is stumped when her teacher instructs her students to write curricula vitae listing three of their talents. Seeking to discover exactly what she is good at, Indie repeatedly stumbles-sometimes with comical results. Her attempt to master hair-wrapping leaves one of her best friends with a bald spot, her stab at talking to animals incites a donkey to chew off a chunk of herhair and she can't pull off a single trick when she tries to perform magic. Meanwhile, the C.V. she creates for the ugly, drooling dog at her mother's rescue center-"Can sit very still for ages. Can make his eyeballs look in two different directions at the same time."-brings no takers. In a kid-pleasing if predictable denouement, Indie adds the seemingly un-adoptable dog to her roster of pets and is lauded in the local paper with the headline, "Indie has a talent for doing good!" Indie and her pals return in Oops, I Lost My Best(est) Friends, due out the same month. Ages 7-10. (Apr.)