'Anna’s anxious when she’s picked to befriend the new girl in her class. For a start, Ellie is ill and can’t come to school herself. So Anna has to communicate with her through a new kind of robot. But Anna is also worried that her life’s too small and boring to be of interest to her new friend. Compared to the other girls, she doesn’t have anything exciting to talk about and so when Ellie asks her a question, a little white lie pops out. Then another and another. When Ellie finds out the truth, can their friendship survive ...?
'Inspired by a true story, a groundbreaking robot helps friendship blossom in this poignant and uplifting novella from bestseller Lisa Thompson.'
The Small Things is the story of Anna, a kid who feels like she's on the outside at school. Despite having friends in her class Anna is constantly worried about fitting in with them because her family can't afford for her to be involved in out of school activities like her friends are. Instead of being able to attend football, horse riding, or ice skating, she spends her evenings at home alone.
When a new girl, Ellie, joins her class things start to change. The thing that makes Ellie stand out from other kids, she's not actually in the class. It turns out that Ellie is quite sick, and isn't able to come to class in person. As such, there's a new addition in the form of an interactive robot that allows Ellie to see and hear everything from her home; and even interact with her fellow classmates. When Anna is picked to pair up with Ellie she's at first excited, but when Ellie begins to ask her what she does outside of school Anna panics. She doesn't want her new friend to think that she's boring. So she starts to make up some stuff.
What begins as one little lie about what she did the night before becomes an entire series of lies, ones where Anna is able to do all of the activities that she's always wanted to. The problem is, she's now lying to her new friend; and the lies can't be kept up forever.
The Small Things is, at its heart, a book about being true to yourself. Over the course of the book Anna feels like she needs to make up things about herself to seem interesting, stories about learning to ice skate or going on trips to the ice cream parlour with her family. At first it's tiny things, things that don't mean much, but eventually it begins to consume Anna and she's having to try and keep Ellie from asking her about things in front of other people, so that her lies don't get exposed. Not only is this tiring for her, having to remember all of her lies and stopping Ellie from finding out the truth, but it makes her feel like a bad friend too.
Not only does Anna have to learn that lying is bad, a good moral for any kids book, but that the things Ellie liked about her weren't the things that she was lying about. Ellie liked Anna's friendliness, her outgoing personality, and the small things she does to be kind to others. She shows Anna that it's not the big, exciting lies that made the two of them friends, but the little things that make her who she is that did. The book is telling kids that even if they don't feel like they're exciting people, they don't have to be, that just being themselves is good enough.
The book also covers the topic of disabled children pretty well, and I never once felt like Ellie was simply being used as a plot device, or was only included to make Anna feel guilty. Disabled people are so often used as plot devices where people are told that they should feel sorry for them, or used to make characters feel bad, it was so refreshing for Ellie to be just treated like a regular kid, albeit one who we interacted with via a robot. The integration of the robot into the story was well done too, and was my introduction to this technology. With remote learning being so widespread and accessible thanks to Covid I was hoping it was something that was being offered to disabled students before, but learning that it's not, and that robots like this are being used instead was something of an eyeopener.
I think that there's a lot of good morals in The Small Things and that it's got some incredibly positive messages in its pages about being inclusive and accepting of others, but also of yourself. We would all be happier if like Anna we learned to love the small things that make us who we are, and realise that we don't need exciting hobbies to make us wonderful people.
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