Review: Olivia and Snowflake - Julie Sykes

Olivia and Snowflake by Julie Sykes
Series: Unicorn Academy: Where Magic Happens #6
My rating: {★★★★☆}

Children's Fiction
Published October 4th 2018 by Nosy Crow

Source: Review copy sent by Jonathan Ball Publishers

Imagine a school where you meet your own unicorn and have amazing adventures together! That’s what happens for the girls at Unicorn Academy on beautiful Unicorn Island.

Olivia is so happy to be at Unicorn Academy. She hopes her sweet unicorn, Snowflake, will discover her magic before graduation day!

Everyone is busy decorating Unicorn Academy for the graduation ball, but it looks like someone is trying to ruin the party. It’s up to Olivia and Snowflake to save the day – and the school!

**I voluntarily read and reviewed a review copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.**

I read this book together with my five year old daughter. With only nine chapters this is a perfect chapter book for us to snuggle up with together. There's also lovely illustrations every few pages that help her to stay focused and interested in the story.

Unicorn Academy is a school where each child who goes gets to be paired with their very own unicorn and they all have lessons (and plenty of adventures) together. Each unicorn is born with their own special power and in order to graduate from the Academy the unicorn has to find their magic and bond with their rider.

Before reading this book we had only read one other Unicorn Academy story and while it would be best to read these adventures sequentially from the first book, we still managed to find our feet with the happenings from the other books. This however does seem to be a mini finale where characters from the first six books are graduating and an overall plot arc of some of the mysterious happenings from previous books is uncovered, so I would suggest reading the first six books if you can before moving on to any other books in this series.

In this book we follow Olivia, a girl who is keeping a secret from her friends, and her unicorn Snowflake. The book is both full of magic and adventure and lessons for the readers to learn that trust in friendship goes both ways, as well as being accepted for who you are.

As I mentioned, there is a larger plot arc that comes to a head in this book and with that there are also great lessons about greed and power and how appearances may be deceiving.

These are fairly short books - just over 100 pages each and are great for young readers who are interested in horses/unicorns and magic and adventure and again, they are also great for young listeners who will sit for a chapter book with an older reader.