Boom Town

Love this book. It parallels the growth of even a modern city- from a town to a full size city and shows kids how businesses grow from simple ideas and needs. Kids love the concept.

This book is a very good example for little girls, because it shows a girl in the role of the main character who is very intelligent and thinks for herself. Amanda opens up shop selling pies to the miners in a California boom town and has quite a successfull business very quickly. Unlike many historical fiction stories where the main girl character is portrayed almost as a goody-two-shoes, Amanda has a style completely her own. She pulls the reader into the story and keeps them intereted the entire way through (no easy task when the target audience is in the preschool to second grade age group). I should also mention that this is the second book in a series about Amanda and her family, and I feel that all of the books keep the same lively attitude as this one. Since this book is part of a series, it is possible that younger children could get confused if they are read out of order, so the people who read to them should keep that in mind. I think that these books, when used in a classroom setting, would be a very good segue into a unit on the Wild West or pioneers, especially since they portray girls and women as having minds of thier own and not just as extensions of their families. This is especially important because many books about the Old West are focused more on boys, and these books have a girl for the main character. All in all, I would recommend this book without any hesitation and I consider it to be a very strong sequel to a powerful first book.