Boolino Fiction Express Review

My girls love reading. Bean always has more than one book on the go and now that Little Miss J can read I hope she'll be the same. The only problem is keeping them away from the computer for long enough to read a book!

If you have the same problem with your child, you could try to combine the two. Boolino has just launched a new online interactive reading platform - Fiction Express for Families. It's something that they have been running in schools for a while, but now it is available for families too.

It's a very simple platform to use. Every two months a new book starts, and users receive an email with the link to start reading. At the end of each chapter you as a family get to choose between three exciting options for how the story will continue. Once the votes have been cast, the author then writes the next chapter based on the winning vote. Every Friday, families will find out how the story continues.

During this time, Fiction Express has a blog that you can leave comments about the book and interact with other readers and the authors. The authors are absolutely brilliant at communicating with the children, and are always happy to answer questions about the chapters. They also take part in video reviews and interact frequently on social media. We have found that it's a good tool for reluctant readers as it helps to engage children in the whole process of the story, and it's broken up weekly so it stops them from getting too overwhelmed with reading.

I went through it all with Bean and she was fascinated. She loves reading anyway, but this helped her to really get into the story, especially as she could cast a vote to change the outcome - she thinks that is really cool! I think they'd be really great for Little Miss J too because now she can read but she doesn't have much patience to read longer books, so a chapter at a time with an incentive to read more would really encourage her.

The age ranges are: 6+ 8+ and 10+ and at the moment it costs £6.99 every two months. Great value - for the price of a book you get so much extra on top.

Disclosure - we were given a free subscription for the purpose of this review. All opinions are honest and our own.