Chicken Soup for Little Souls: The Best Night Out with Dad »

Motivational speaker Jack Canfield is the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. With over 65 books to his credit, Canfield has taken the inspirational advice he delivered in his speeches and forged one of the most popular book series in print.

The Chicken Soup for Little Souls series (more than 400,000 copies sold) brought the magic of Chicken Soup to young readers with heartwarming stories of love, friendship, and kindness that parents could read to their young children. Now these classic books have been resized and rewritten into intermediate-level readers that kids 6 and up can read themselves. While the text has been shortened and simplified, it retains the enduring Chicken Soup message of sincere and heartfelt virtue.

The new reader series starts with two books:

In The Best Night Out With Dad, Danny can't wait to go to the circus with his dad. It's going to be the best night ever! But the night has a surprise ending when Danny meets Victor in the ticket line.

In The Greatest Gift of All, Izzy finds out that her parents won't let her go to Pine View Camp. Her summer is ruined! But things begin to change for Izzy when she starts to do Give-back Time with Grandpa Mike and meets the Braids Girl.

With a lower price point, friendly format and the power of the Chicken Soup brand, these books will inspire children as they teach the joy of reading.

Key Features

• The previous books were for parents to read to children; the new books have been shortened by approximately 25% and redesigned to make them appropriate for intermediate readers (ages 6 and up).


• The books contain 4-color illustrations throughout, including many full-page bleeds.


• The recognizable brand, along with the lower price point and smaller trim size, make this a perfect impulse purchase for busy parents.

School Library Journal

K-Gr 3These three titles adapt longer stories of generosity and unexpected kindness for the picture-book set. In The Best Night Out, Danny is excited about going to the circus with his dad. However, when he meets a boy and his father waiting in line and it turns out they cannot afford the price of admission, Danny offers them his own tickets, and he and his father attend a basketball game instead. In Goodness Gorillas, Ms. King's students form a club to do good deeds, and all but the class bully, Todd, join the effort. When his dog is killed, the teacher encourages the children to reach out to him, resulting in the boy changing his ways and joining their club. In The Never-Forgotten Doll, Ellie learns that her 88-year-old favorite babysitter still feels sad about the loss of her prized china doll when she was a child. Ellie spends her savings on an antique doll and presents it to Miss Maggie for her birthday, leaving the elderly woman visibly touched. While the covers of these feel-good tales are rather ordinary, the realistic watercolor illustrations inside, particularly Dodson's, use strong colors in their full- and half-page paintings that complement the texts. The stories are readable, and the messages are clear, if a bit heavy-handed. They will be useful for adults who want to present strong moral values in a nonreligious manner. Although they may prove to a be a bit too sugarcoated for some, they are sure to provoke discussions about the need for kindness in our all-too-violent world.Nancy Menaldi-Scanlan, LaSalle Academy, Providence, RI