Uma the reader
Uma read me a book last week! A whole book!
Not one of Tomie de Paola's best, but not bad. Of course she had to ask me about a lot of words but there were more that she read entirely on her own, without hesitation. For years now she's been frustrated that her sister could read and she couldn't, and I've told her that one day the light bulb would go off over her head (ding!) and she'd be reading. Well, I think it just did.
Aside from Tomie de Paola, she retains her taste for the gothic in children's literature. She begs for Goosebumps books but I refuse to read them to her when there's better stuff around. We settled on "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and a couple of edgier ones she brought home from the library. She's got to be the only kindergartener in the world who asks for Transylvanian ghost and vampire stories complete with a jacket blurb from Andrei Codrescu.
Big sister's tastes are pretty gruesome, too, but in a different vein. She's just finished reading a book about Phineas Gage, the guy who got an iron rod blown through his skull and lived to tell the tale.