Children's Fiction Special Needs
Frantic Friend Countdown
- Publisher
- Formac Publishing Company Limited
- Initial publish date
- Aug 2016
- Category
- Special Needs, Beginner, Humorous Stories
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9781459504240
- Publish Date
- Aug 2016
- List Price
- $14.95
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Where to buy it
Recommended Age, Grade, and Reading Levels
- Age: 6 to 10
- Grade: 2 to 5
- Reading age: 5 to 7
Description
Meet Maximus Todd! He's the kid who can't sit still! Max has a dilemma. Everyone's got a best friend except him. But when a new kid arrives at the school, Max plays a secret game to make him Max's buddy. Too bad the new kid would rather hang out with barf-breath Mandy Beth, peskiest pest in the entire town!
Max finds that while it's not always easy being a kid -- especially if you're a bit different -- there is often humour, kindness and love in the most unexpected places.
About the authors
L. M. NICODEMO is an elementary school teacher who hopes that this series will mark the beginning of a long and joyful career in writing. She lives with her family in southwestern Ontario.
Look! Look what I've done!! The words of an eight year old as he holds up the drawing of a vibrant red fire engine. Oh Graham, that's wonderful.
Really? Oh this is good. You draw a picture and you get a reaction. I could get into this! And so it began. The seed was planted, further watered by bedtime rituals of propping pillows up against his bedroom wall getting into bed to get lost in a family member's reading of The Wind in the Willows.
An unintended lesson learned through those readings that our intrepid illustrator still calls upon in his illustration work is that the viewer will take different things from the illustration and he will add elements to the illustration that may go over some heads, but others will catch them and smile. There's always something to look at.
A graduate of the illustration program at Sheridan College in Ontario, Graham thought he would stick around the big smoke and in addition to his work as a designer at Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart, he would also cultivate his Flock of Seagulls hair style and work on his dance floor moves. But alas soon follicles started to recede and shoulder pads deflated, so Graham moved back to his hometown of Ottawa, Ontario to contemplate his next career move.
It was in Ottawa that Graham began his freelance illustration and graphic design career. A career that has spawned illustrations for such publishers as Orca Book Publishers, Scholastic Canada, and Meadowside Books of the United Kingdom, as well as numerous Canadian government agencies and private design firms.
He lives in Merrickville, Ontario with a circus star family: his juggling wife, a helldriver daughter, a canine cannonball, and a fire breathing cat.
Editorial Reviews
"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."
CM Magazine
"
The target audience will surely have no trouble relating to the storylines. The blend of fun graphics by Graham Ross, with varying sizes and designs of text in the quickly paced 96 pages, will be appealing to both beginning and reluctant readers.
The series is written by a teacher who clearly has insight into the mind of a child who feels the type of anxiety that Max does, presumably because she has encountered some throughout her career. While it may be rare to have a child as young as Max display the self-awareness and strength of will that he does, perhaps these books will serve as inspiration to children facing the same difficulties with their own Super Fidgets.
The four books were published concurrently for Formac's First Novels Series, in a format that should prove to be attractive to young readers.
Rated good, even great at times, generally useful!"
Resource Links
Other titles by
Other titles by
Max Todd and the School Trip Squirmies
Max Todd's Frantic Friend Countdown
Max Todd Gets the Super Fidgets
Max Todd and the Flu Shot Frenzies
Max Todd's Camping Chaos
Max Todd's Big Game Jitters
The DATA Set Ten-Book Collection (Boxed Set)
March of the Mini Beasts; Don't Disturb the Dinosaurs; The Sky Is Falling; Robots Rule the School; A Case of the Clones; Invasion of the Insects; Out of Remote Control; Down the Brain Drain; S.O.S. from Outer Space; The Revenge of Dr. von Naysayer
School Trip Squirmies
Camping Chaos
The DATA Set Collection #2 (Boxed Set)
A Case of the Clones; Invasion of the Insects; Out of Remote Control; Down the Brain Drain