Young CAM Jansen and the Ice Skate Mystery

I home school my son, he's a struggling reader. The Young Cam Jansen series has proven to be wonderful for the transition to books with smaller type face and more words per page. He's feeling successful and loves to help solve the mystery as he reads them. The series has good pictures that relate well to the written text. And the text is well done in short sentences. There are some challenging words here and there, but my son is so engrossed is the story he tries his darndest to sound the word out. As they say nothing suceeds like success.

You have to love Cam Jansen. When you're a kid, you read all of these stories about magic powers, mystery, and adventure. But everyone tells you magic can't exist. Cam Jansen manages to solve every case without the use of magic... she's a real girl. That's what makes her special and what makes you want to red more and more. Cam Jansen is a real kid superhero, and the thought that a person like her could actually exist... makes her the best kid detective ever! The Ice-Skate Mystery is one of the best in the Young Cam series.

While my daughter, age 3 1/2, is younger than the targeted readers of this series, she has loved Cam Jansen since she was 2. These stories are wonderfully written and illustrated and they encourage children to think. My daughter has red hair and brown eyes just like Cam, and now she wants to have long hair like Cam. I highly recommend all of the Cam Jansen books.

...We have most of the Young Cam Jansen paperbacks and recommend them unreservedly for other read-along parents, especially parents of young girls. Less-than-ideal personalities, personal conflicts and misunderstandings are all presented, WITH good resolutions, character modeling, and handling of sticky situations. The main character is a self-confident, intelligent thinker and investigator, with a boy as her best friend. Not exactly typical, and not for ultraconservative parents who think that only boys should use their minds and have adventures. One particularly nice aspect is that most of the stories take place outside of a public-school setting, recognizing that most discovery and meaningful social interactions take place outside of that institution -- a point not lost on homeschooling-minded parents. The one public-school setting (see the "Lost Tooth" mystery) is in the Art class, where creativity and fun are the dominant theme. Get and read the Young Cam Jansen series!....