Something Beautiful
Written by Sharon Dennis Wyeth
Reviewed by Alma S. (age 8)
Do you know how it feels to do something beautiful for the world? The girl in this story is looking for something beautiful. Every time she looks, she finds something sad like a poor lady, trash in the courtyard, a garden without flowers. Finally she found that all the things she saw during the day were really beautiful. The lesson of this story is that she said to herself, ?I pick up trash. I sweep up the glass. I scrub the door very hard. When Die disappears I feel powerful.? (The word DIE was written on her door? It reminds Ana of when some kids were writing on the wall on her block and she erased it just like in the story.) She did a good thing by trying to clean up her neighborhood. The thing I like about the main character is that she never gave up because she really wanted to see something beautiful.
The illustrator uses a lot of brown and black. We think it needs more bright colors and it also needs more pictures. This book is different from any other book because the little girl always wants to see something beautiful and she also doesn?t want to see something sad like a poor lady who lives on a big cardboard carton wrapped in plastic on the sidewalk.
We felt sad at the beginning of the book because she just saw ugly things like a poor lady in the street, trash on the courtyard, and the word die on her door. At the end of the story we felt happy because she did not see the word DIE anymore on her door, she picked up the trash, and she gave the poor lady a home were she could live. We recommend this book to teenagers who smoke and do graffiti on the wall and to children six and seven years old because they should see something beautiful like the girl in the story. We thought it was a sad story with a happy ending.