Csongor Daniel
NRG Works (2008)
ISBN 0965878147
Reviewed by Avery Largent (age 9) for Reader Views (11/08)
“The Girl with the Healing Hands” by Csonger Daniel is a dreadful book about a young girl named Kylie who is trained to be a healer. With no big troubles or conflicts for the main character and a simple style by the author, this book felt like it was aimed at much younger kids than the 7+ written on the back cover. Also, the author used his daughter’s pictures for the illustrations in this book, and though this idea was a nice one, they also made the book seem a little too young.
The author’s writing is poorly arranged, and his style is overly simple, with very little detail. For instance, when Kylie is learning about people’s auras it reads, “After a while, she realized she could not just feel, but even see the difference. Sometimes there would be fog around Daddy’s hands. Sometimes she could see it around his whole body. As she grew older, Kylie was able to see this foggy, misty, and smoky ‘something’ around everyone, even around animals and plants. As she later learned, this ‘something’ is called an aura.” The book didn’t explore very deeply into the subject. How did she find out that the thing was called an aura? Why could she sometimes see it and sometimes she couldn’t? And even by the end of the book, the author didn’t answer those questions. The author never talks about what the aura looks like, other then a hazy wall around a person. Also, you can easily see how simple the writing is; it feels like a book written for much younger children. Unfortunately, I did not find this style very capturing or a nice change from other books.
Related to the author’s poor writing style, there seemed not to be really any conflicts or troubles for Kylie. A typical book has pretty big troubles for the main character. However, the one and only conflict for Kylie was when she was in class at school and started practicing her healing, waving her hand here and there in odd ways, and her classmates started laughing. By the next chapter, that trouble was completely forgotten. I found this book very boring, and almost completely pointless because of that.
Beside the simplified style and few conflicts for Kylie, the pictures seem to make the book look like it’s for even younger kids. Despite the fact I appreciate the idea of the author using his daughter as the illustrator, it unfortunately made the book look unappealing from the cover. Though she is a good artist for a child, it seems, for the sake of the author, he should have used a grown-up, more professional illustrator.
Altogether, “The Girl with the Healing Hands” by Csonger Daniel is a horrid book. With a simple, immature style, and no troubles for the main character, this book is very boring. I would not recommend this book to my friends, and hope that any other people who read it enjoy it much more than I did.
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