I absolutely loved the art in this book and the tenderness between characters. However, the main part of the story disappointed me. The back cover copy and back matter discuss how to deal with disappointment when life doesn’t measure up to expectations, but I didn’t really see how Isabel’s experience actually demonstrated that. We follow her over the course of her birthday where she encounters let-down after let-down, and while she understandably gets upset, we never sit with her as she processes her emotions or finds a different perspective. Instead, everything is fixed at the end of the day by granting Isabel exactly what she wished for, which also kind of irked me because I dislike the trope where people lie to someone about their birthday and pretend not to care only to plan a surprise party. The surprise party is nice, but the entire day in which Isabel believed her family didn’t care about her preferences was not as nice. At the end of the day, this could be a really sweet book for the right reader, but I was hoping for something more based on the description of the book.