Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Sophie the Hero
Illustrator: Laura Tallardy
Fiction Series
For ages 7 to 10
Scholastic , 2010 ISBN: 978-0545146050
Sophie is the kind of person who is not content to be ordinary. She wants to be special, noticeable, and different. Sophie has done her best to be awesome, and has met with limited success. Now, but sheer happenstance, she is a hero. What happened was this: Sophie’s little neighbor, Ella, ran into the road without looking and would have been hit by a car if Sophie had not saved her. Ella now worships Sophie, and Sophie sets about making sure that everyone on the school bus and in school knows that she is a bona fide hero.
Sophie soon discovers that people very quickly forget acts of heroism. She has to do something to make sure that her classmates and friends do not forget how special she is. After some firefighters visit her class Sophie realizes that she has to become a career hero, a person who does heroic things on a regular basis.
Sophie does her best to do heroic things, but it turns out to be harder than she thought it would be. For some reason Sophie’s efforts to save her friends and classmates from injury don’t work out as planned, and Sophie ends up being an anti-hero instead. Who knew that being a hero could be so hard and so exhausting.
In this deliciously funny and entertaining Sophie book (the second title in the series), Sophie once again tries to find a way to be special. She wants to be admired and looked up to, but one heroic act does not mean that one gets to be a permanent hero. Sophie’s misadventures in herodom will amuse young readers and they will come to appreciate that perhaps being a hero is not all it’s cracked up to be.
