Ella Diaries #6: Pony School Showdown product reviews

Both my Miss nine and Miss Seven love the Ella diaries so they were both very excited when I brought this home for them to review. Miss Seven enjoys reading the previous Ella Diaries so they definitely score high on the re readability factor. Miss Seven got to this book first and really enjoyed it. She thought it was one of the best in the series. I think she was slightly biased towards the horses story line!

This Diary is about Ella's experiences at Pony school. My Miss Nine enjoyed the storyline about Zoe and Ella and Ella wanting to have a pony like Zoe. This diary follows the same characters as in earlier diaries which I like as I feel like we are getting to know the characters in Ella's life really well.

What I really like and the little misses as well is that because the diaries are written in diary format you can read as little or as much as you want and you really feel that you are reading a proper diary due to the language and tense that Ella uses. Also the "fake" mistakes adds a touch of reality to it and the handwritten type.

The books always have one poem in them says Miss Nine. She finds the story lines interesting and engaging as they are very realistic as to what happens in real life and Ella is always funny in her language and the situations that she finds herself in.

What I like most is that they are very age appropriate books and that my girls really enjoy reading them but that they also hold my interest so I am happy to read them to the girls as well. I can definitely recommend this book and if you have read previous Ella Diaries then you will enjoy reading this just as much.

My daughter quite likes the Ella's Diary series and so I was glad to see this one. My daughter likes horses and I thought she might like the story-line. We sat down and read this book over the course of 4 days. I just read an many dairy entries as I felt like per night. Some of the entries are long, and some are a paragraph or less.

What I liked about the book was that there were a few basic facts about horses that were interesting. I knew some of them, but they were new information to my daughter. I liked the illustrations and the almost realistic language in the diary coming from Ella. There are spelling mistakes and crossed out lines as well, which added to the idea that this is a child's diary.

Ella's descriptions of the events are full of the right level of melodrama that I would expect in a kid's diary and lots of humour as well. Although there is a new queen of mean in the book, it had less direct impact on Ella so it didn't come across as a huge focus point. She did do a few quite mature things as well which I liked. It was almost like her character was growing as she experienced new things. I also like that she didn't 100% like horses right at the start but she came to her love of horses in a different and still totally valid way.

My daughter enjoyed the story, but she wasn't as keen on the way Ella talked in the book. Ella has a strange way of saying certain words in the book, adding to her style. I thought it was quite clever, because I know my own diary from ages 10 - 12 years would have been filled with made-up words and me-isms. It was the first time we really noticed this coming through in the story, I think so another way that Ella is growing. I'm definitely going to re-read and share this with Miss 3 next as I know she'll love it.