Maddi’s Fridge & The Day I Ran Away – Book Reviews

Every now and then I get the opportunity to share some product reviews here (usually of the book variety). I think it is a great opportunity to give exposure to authors and it’s fun for us to get a chance to read some books we may never have heard of before.

I do try to be careful with the reviews that I accept, I only accept ones that sound like they would be a good fit for our family from the beginning and then I am always honest with our reviews.

Today I’m going to share about Maddi’s Fridge and The Day I Ran Away, they are both published by Flashlight Press.

I was actually first asked to review The Day I Ran Away but after reading a little about Maddi’s Fridge I asked if I could have a copy of that one too. Maddi’s Fridge deals with childhood hunger and we are focusing a lot on character and empathy in our homeschool this year.

The story of Maddi’s Fridge follows two friends, Maddi and Sofia, who love to play together and one day Sofia looks in Maddi’s fridge and realizes she has no food except a little bit of milk which they are saving for Maddi’s younger brother.

Maddi begs Sofia to promise not to tell anyone about their empty fridge and true to form she promises, but she regrets it almost immediately. After struggling with the secret for a few days Sofia ends up telling her mom and their family buys some food for Maddi’s family.

While the book idea is not revolutionary it is a great way to start the conversation about childhood hunger with your kids, and my favorite part of the book is at that back, they have a page of ideas on how to help friends with empty refrigerators. This was a great conversation starter for us since we’ve talked about kids that have no food in other countries, like Africa, but not really much about those who live around us that are also dealing with that issue.

The other book, The Day I Ran Away, is about a little girl who decided to run away from home and live in the backyard because her purple shirt was dirty and she had to wear a white one. The book is supposed to use yoga and meditation for creative toddler problem solving.

I was interested in this book at first because one of my children is highly sensitive and overly dramatic and I was looking forward to a book that could start some discussions and maybe give us a few tools.

The first thing that I noticed though was just the bad attitude of the little girl in the book and how she never felt any remorse for it and the parents didn’t really discuss how her attitude wasn’t acceptable.

As for the yoga poses, I thought there would be more of a focus on them throughout the book, the girl is just discretely doing them without mention about them. There is a link to the yoga poses and their names on the Flashlight Press activity page, but I was just expecting more.

So there you have it! An honest review on two books!

If you have any suggestions for other books to read with kids about childhood hunger I’d love to hear about them in the comments!