The Book My Tween Actually Kept Reading

Eli is ten and he does not take book suggestions from me anymore. That is not a complaint, it is just what fifth grade did to him. So when I handed him a book in June and he opened it in the car without being asked twice, I kept my mouth shut and let it happen. I did not want to break whatever that was.

The book was You Are Awesome by Matthew Syed. I had seen the title in a parenting thread, thought about it for two weeks, and finally ordered one copy myself. It is 160 pages, listed for ages 9 to 12 and grades 4 to 6, and it measures 6.25 by 8.75 inches, so it fits a kid's hands and slides into a backpack without an argument. Eli had turned ten in May. He finished it by the end of July.

Here is why I bought it. In the fall of fourth grade Eli stopped raising his hand in math. One fractions quiz went badly and that was the end of it. He did not act upset about it. He just quietly stopped volunteering, which is harder to notice than crying and took me a few weeks to catch. I was not looking for a book to fix that. I was looking for something he could read himself that would say what I had been saying badly.

Matthew Syed is a former Olympic table tennis player, and the book was illustrated by Toby Triumph. Sourcebooks Explore published it in July 2019 as part of the You Are Awesome series. The argument Syed makes all the way through is that skill comes from practice and mistakes, not from being born with a gift. The listing calls the book uplifting and interactive, and there are parts where the reader is asked to do something rather than only read. That is the whole pitch, and it held Eli's attention in a way my pep talks never have.

In September he came home with a rough math test and said he needed more practice. Not that he was bad at math. That was the first time in a year.

How it actually got read matters more than what is in it. We drove to Mark's mother's house in Columbus in June, about an hour and ten minutes, and Eli started it in the back seat. He did not finish it that weekend. He read a little at a time over six weeks, which is how he reads anything, and then one evening he was done. Since then it has lived in his backpack or on his desk. He goes back to parts of it, which I did not expect from a book with no story in it.

What he skipped were the quiz-style sections. He told me they felt like homework, and he was not going to do homework inside a book he was reading on his own. He is ten, so I let it go. Some sections do read like a lecture, and I think that is why those parts sat untouched. If your kid is the type who likes a workbook and a pencil, that same section will probably land.

I also read part of Mindset by Carol Dweck, a library copy, for myself. It is an adult book and Eli has not read it. But it makes the same case at book length, and it helped me see what You Are Awesome is doing for him: shortening the argument to something a ten-year-old will actually finish. Syed wrote the version that fits in a backpack.

What I can tell you is what happened in September. He came home with a rough math test and said out loud that he needed more practice. Not that he was bad at math. That was the first time in a year. I am not going to tell you a book did that. He is ten, he changes every few months, and he still does not raise his hand every day. What I will say is that the sentence he used was the book's sentence, and nobody reminded him of it.

The other thing worth saying is that this is the only one of the five books we have tried that Eli reads alone. Nora has her read-aloud books, the ones we do together at bedtime and at the kitchen table. Eli is past all of those and rolls his eyes at them. You Are Awesome is his, it lives in his bag, and nobody reads it to him. That is most of why it stuck.

One more honest note. This is not a book for a child who is already in a bad place about school. It is cheerful and it moves fast, and a kid who is really struggling needs a person, not a paperback. I would also not buy it for a child who hates reading, because 160 pages is 160 pages. Eli reads. He reads at night without being told. That is the kind of kid this lands for.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you not to hand this to a seven-year-old. The reading age is 9 to 12 for a reason, and Nora, who is six, would get nothing from it except the pictures. I would tell you to let your kid skip the exercises if they want to, because Eli did and he still came away with the idea. I would tell you not to quiz him on it afterward. The one time I asked what he thought, I got a shrug and a change of subject, and the good stuff showed up at the kitchen table six weeks later instead. And I would tell you not to expect it to fix anything. It did not fix Eli. It gave him a way to say something he already half believed, which is a smaller thing and, for us, a more useful one.