Title: Hope Jones Saves the World (Hope Jones Saves the World #1)
Author: Josh Lacey
Illustrator: Beatriz Castro
Publisher: Andersen Press
Genre: Older children’s/middle grade fiction
Book format: Paperback
Sweet Strawberries: 
Description: Hi! My name is Hope Jones. I’m giving up plastic to save our oceans!
Giving up plastic is really hard. There’s so much of it everywhere!
In the supermarket, my classroom, our bathroom…
And grown-ups don’t seem to care. Luckily I have my friend Harry to help me. Together we’re going to save the world!
*Free copy provided by publisher for rerview…
Review: This is such a great and simple story but with a great message about the environment and problem with plastic. ‘Hope Jones Saves the World’ is filled with black, white and grey illustrations among the text and boasts, on the back cover, that it’s a fully recylable book with no plastic finishes! Hope Jones makes a New Year’s resolution, to stop using plastic to help save the world, but it’s not so easy to save the planet from plastic when it is literally everywhere!
Hope begins a blog showing what she’s going to do to help end the use of plastic and soon starts protesting at her local supermarket. This whole story is written in a fun style of almost daily blog posts and I love the journey Hope goes on to save the world. The story begins with Hope explaining a bit about her resolution and why plastics are bad for the planet. There are lots of fun pictures on the way breaking up the text and I love how easy this book was to get into right away.
As Hope gets more involved in her battle against plastic she ends up going viral and gets more and more people involved in her cause. I love how this story shows just how easy it is for all of us to help reduce our plastic use, even if we think it’s difficult to do so at first. The story is a fun one with Hope and her family having a few problems along the way and although the story is overall a very happy and positive, what happened at the Willow Foods meeting does show the unfortunate reality of how difficult it is to stop plastics being used when some people or organisations aren’t so keen.
The illustrations just make this book so enjoyable to read. The characters are all fun to look at, their expressions clear, and I just love how the illustrations and borders of pages and things help to make the text feel easier to read. The story is funny and ends in a great and positive way. And I just love the fact that at the back of the book, after the tale is finished, there are ideas that children use to help them save the planet and encourage others to do the same.
Overall this is a fun book and with a positive environmental message. The ideas in the book for reducing plastic use are simple ones and I love how it shows that so much good can come from doing this one thing. It’s certainly a book that will be easy to enjoy and one that will help kids to understand the plastic problem as well as help them come up with ideas to help reduce their plastic use, if they want to. This is a really enjoyable read and one I’d recommend, though I did think the mention of black bogeys was, for me, a little bit too much…ew! lol
What do you think of this book? Do you like stories featuring environmental messages? Let me know what you think in the comments below 🙂
The Strawberry Post 