Eli turned ten in May, and something shifted in what he is willing to read. He is done with the picture books his little sister still loves, and done with anything that tells him he is special before it tells him anything else. You Are Awesome by Matthew Syed came into the house in June and has been in his backpack or on his desk ever since. Five months, which for a ten year old is close to a lifetime.
I bought it because of one line in the listing: reading age 9 to 12. Not 4 to 8. Not a book for a kindergartner with a wobbly voice. A book for the kid who has started saying he is just not good at math and means it. The Syed book runs 160 pages, illustrated by Toby Triumph, published by Sourcebooks Explore, and it measures about 6.25 by 8.75 inches at roughly 1.1 pounds. Small enough that a fifth grader carries it around instead of shelving it.
Written for the 9 to 12 year old, not for you
160 pages, illustrated, and aimed squarely at the age when a kid decides what he is bad at. Eli finished it in July and still opens it in November.
Amazon Check Today's Price on Amazon →It says out loud what your kid already suspects
Eli had quietly decided, without ever announcing it, that math was a thing other kids were born with. The Syed book argues the opposite for 160 pages: that practice and mistakes build skill, and that talent is not the starting line. The idea was not new to me. It was new coming out of a book instead of out of his mother's mouth, and that is the entire reason I bought it.
The interactive parts give a kid something to do instead of read
This is not a book a kid sits and absorbs. There are parts where the reader writes something down, answers a question, fills in a blank. Eli skipped a fair number of those and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the parts he did do kept him in the chair longer than a straight chapter would have, and at ten, extra minutes in the chair is the whole game.
It fits the exact age when 'I'm not good at it' hardens
The listing says reading age 9 to 12 and grade level 4 to 6. Eli is in fifth grade, so he sits right in the middle of that range. It is also the exact window where a kid stops saying he cannot do this yet and starts saying he is not a math person, a sentence that can follow him for years. Plenty of confidence books are written for four year olds. This one is written for the kid in the middle.
160 pages he actually finished
160 pages looks like a wall from the outside. He started it on the drive to his grandmother's in Columbus in June, read a few pages at a time in the car and then in bits at home, and finished it by the end of July. A ten year old finishing a 160-page book over a summer, with no school assignment attached to it, tells you something about the book.
It is small enough to live in a backpack
At 6.25 by 8.75 inches and about 1.1 pounds, it goes wherever he goes. It has spent the whole fall either in his backpack or sitting on his desk, which is not where our read-once books end up. Books on a shelf get read once. Books in a backpack get read in the car, in the five minutes before dinner, in the gap between homework and bed.
He goes back to parts of it
Five months on, he still opens it to sections he liked. He is not rereading the whole thing cover to cover. He is returning to two or three places that made sense to him, the way anyone returns to a book that actually landed. I did not expect that from a book about practice. I expected him to finish it, tell me it was good, and move on to something else.
It does not need a sports hero
I braced for a sports book, because Matthew Syed was an Olympic table tennis player and I assumed every page would be an athlete's story. Eli has no sports hero story of his own to tell. He plays baseball in the spring and he is not the kid anyone writes about. He read it all the way through anyway, which tells me the argument stands up without a highlight reel attached to it.
The illustrations keep a ten year old in the chair
Toby Triumph's illustrations give the eye somewhere to land. A 160-page book with nothing but text is a wall for a lot of kids this age, and I have watched Eli bounce off thinner books than this one. The pictures are not decoration here. They are a large part of why he kept turning pages on the afternoons when the words alone would have lost him.
It gives a kid words for a bad day
After a rough math test in September, Eli said on his own that he needed more practice. Not that he was bad at math. I am not going to hand a book credit for that, because he is ten, he has good weeks and bad weeks, and one sentence is not a transformation. But it is a sentence he did not have in fourth grade, and I noticed it.
It gives you a better answer than 'you're so smart'
For a long time my answer to 'I'm bad at math' was 'no you're not,' which is just me arguing with a child. Now there is a shared vocabulary in this house. When I say practice, it is no longer only his mother's opinion. It is something he read in a book he picked up himself, and that carries further than anything I could have said on my own.
None of this is a fix, and I want to be careful about that. Eli still has rough afternoons over a worksheet. He still goes quiet when a test comes back. What the book gave him was a way to talk about those afternoons. It did not delete them.
After a rough math test in September, he said on his own that he needed more practice. Not that he was bad at math. I did not put those words in his mouth.
What I'd Skip
Some sections read like a lecture, and Eli felt every one of them. He skipped the quiz-style parts entirely and I did not push him on it. If your child wants a story with characters and a plot, this is not that book, and no enthusiasm from me will turn it into one. I would also skip it for a six year old. Nora is six, has zero interest in it, and has her own shelf of books that suit her better. And if you want something that fixes a child's confidence by the end of the week, skip this one and skip everything else too. Five months in, we are still in the ordinary middle of raising him.
If your kid has started saying they are just not good at it
You Are Awesome is 160 pages for ages 9 to 12, and it is the one book on our shelf Eli reads without being asked. It will not fix anything by Friday. It did give him a sentence to use after a bad test.
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