After a week of Sophie-centric blog entries, it’s finally time to turn our attention to Chloe, whose nose has been in the books almost non-stop for the last couple of weeks.  

Because she’s obsessed with reading the Nancy Drew books in order, even though there’s no need to, she’s currently stuck at number 10.  In order to continue her quest to read the whole series, she needs volume 11, which we don’t have.  But because she’s addicted to reading, she needed to find another tome to occupy her imagination.

She finally turned to Harry Potter about two weeks ago, and quicker than you can say “Voldemort,” she finished the first two books in the series.  She started the third volume the other day, but has temporarily set it aside to read “The Borrowers” instead.  

While it’s absolutely terrific that she’s reading so much, I wonder how much of these books she understands.  It’s not like she sits with a dictionary at her side while she’s turning the pages.  And during the week, we’re rarely around to assist her with vocabulary.

That said, I’m fairly confident she understands the larger themes.  For example, we were having a conversation at dinner the other night about prejudice.  There was an incident at school – a child in her class was using an extremely derogatory word to describe another child, and Chloe sensed that the word was bad, even though she had never heard it before.  She told the teacher that the word was spreading around the classroom.  Over dinner, I explained why the word was so pejorative and intolerant, and Chloe compared it to the way Draco in the Harry Potter books talks insultingly and hatefully about “mudbloods.”  Her analogy was right on point.  It’s always nice to know that the right books can teach kids the right lessons about life.