Fish In A Tree Review

Hello, my friends! Sorry that we have not chatted for a while but I wanted to give you a quick book review on one of the books that I have recently just finished.

The book I read is Fish In A Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. It is about a  sixth-grade girl, named Ally, who has difficulty reading and writing as well as having confidence in herself from the years of being called a loser and failing at school. However, with this new teacher, she starts see hope that she is smart and wonderful while making friends at the same time.

I absolutely loved this book.  I could not think of anything that I did not enjoy or hinder my experience of the book. Everything was beautiful and it flowed nicely. The parts that I loved the most were the quirky titles, the writing, and the characters and their growth.

This has been one of the few books that I have read that had any form of titles for each of its chapters. I enjoyed reading the titles. They were quirky and fun. Not only did the title relate to the chapter and gave you a heads up as to what to expect, but I enjoyed trying to see how the titles fit into the bigger picture of our characters life.

The other thing that I enjoyed was the writing style. Hunt wrote the book in the perspective of an eleven year old. I will admit that the writing style was a bit more like an adult, however it did stay true to the eleven year old mind. When I read this book, I felt as though I was inside this girl’s mind, and the times where the adult writing slipped, you barely recognized and miss it as you are caught up in the story.

Finally the last thing that I enjoyed was the characters and their growth. I will be focusing on our main character Ally and her two friends Albert and Keisha.  I will admit that Keisha did not grow as much as Ally and Albert, but had become one of the many catalyst for growth of these two characters, and helped our main character see herself in a positive light for the first time. However, Albert does do a lot of personal growth. When you first start with Albert, you assume that there is one thing wrong, then discovered it is something completely different. It is through this experience you see Keisha making a claim that Albert should get help and ways to work out his problems. At the end of the book you do see how Albert has grown from this shy know it all to a kid who still knows pretty much everything but is able to socialize more and is able to solve his personal problems. Finally you have Ally’s growth. Even though you do not see a lot of Ally before the change of teachers, you do still glimpses of the before Ally to know that she was not handling her problems.  It was nice to see her grow from that shy student who created problems to distract herself and others from the real problems that she was having to someone who began facing her problems and was starting to help others.

In the end I gave this book five out of five stars. I really enjoyed the book, and just a fun read that I did not want to put down. I would also recommend this book to everyone. In doing research, I did hear that there was some inconsistencies of the military and her life and all the moving that she has done. Aside from that inconsistency, I do believe that everyone will enjoy the adventure of learning to read as well as the growth of our main character.

I do hope that your weekend is fun and that all the father’s enjoy their special day. Happy Father’s Day! Happy reading!