Amy Costales

I really liked this book for many reasons. One reason is that an English speaker and a Spanish speaker can read this book. It has the text on either side of the page. Another reason is that it shows a great representation of friendship. It shows two girls doing everything together and even when they fight they still stay friends. The illustrations were amazing in the book. They were very colorful and showed the emotion of the girls and the neighbor. The language in the book was something I have never seen before. It showed English writing on one side and Spanish writing on the other. It showed what the girls were doing in great detail. For instance, it said “So Maritza took the potions and dumped them on Lupe. And Lupe, with magic potion dripping from her braids, threw a pitcher at her super best friend Maritza Garcia”. If there were no illustrations the readers could picture that in their heads easily. The characters were also very believable. Children at this age are very imaginative. They spend their days imagining different places there are at and pretending to be someone else. The big message of this story is to show friendships. It shows how even when you disagree with your friends, you still are friends and can move past it.… (mer)

I’m pretty neutral about this book. I like it but it’s not the best book ever. This book was written in both Spanish and English. The sentences were easy to follow and some dialogue was used. The main characters were Lupe, Maritza (her best friend), Mrs. Ramirez and Lupe’s mother. These characters were all believable because when you go around the neighborhood, you usually see kids playing, parents, and people taking care of their lawns. It’s also normal to have a best friend and want to be with them all the time. When the author introduces Mrs. Ramirez, it seemed as if she was just the mean old lady next door that doesn’t like kids, but throughout the story you could see that this wasn’t the case. The story was told from a third person pint of view. Before reading, the title said Lupe and her super best friend so I automatically thought that Lupe would be telling the story but this wasn’t the case. The plot was pretty organized, but to me the conflict happened so suddenly. I feel as though the author could have led up to the argument that the girls had about the magic potions they were making. One minute they were having fun and the other they were throwing drinks on each other. I did like the fact that the neighbor Mrs. Ramirez, always noticed things about them. But when she noticed that they were fighting, she didn’t say anything. I thought that the author was hinting that she would be the one to make them come back together but that wasn’t the case. I think she could have had a bigger part in this story since she was always there. The illustrations were very nice though. I like how the author made the girls look different. They didn’t look like the typical young girls, I actually thought that one of them was a boy at first glance. I’m also not sure how old they are because they look like they could be in their early teen years but it doesn’t seem like it based off the games they are playing. However, I did like that when the two girls were arguing, the pages were split in half and they had their own sides. I could really feel that they weren’t friends compared to the other pages. I would say this book is contemporary realistic fiction because these events are very realistic. Children go through arguing with a friend all the time. Overall, I think the underlying message was that when you have a best friend, you will always come back to each other no matter what.… (mer)