I remember long, long ago in my youth (you know, when dinosaurs roamed the earth) having a Holly Hobbie rag doll. I seem to remember her being dressed like a little prairie girl with a sunbonnet, long dress and apron. My, how times have changed. I guess this modern young Holly Hobbie is like the great (or great-great-great) granddaughter of the original Holly Hobbie I grew up with.

Holly Hobbie & Friends begins with a long series of pretty pictures and text setting up the story. You'll learn the names of the important people in the story and that Holly is visiting them in the town of Clover for her summer vacation. It's worth watching at least once to get the gist of things, but after that, happily, you can hold any button and skip the entire introductory sequence. (Good choice, designers.)

At this point, I get to start a new game, continue my existing game (if I've previously started one), adjust the options or view the credits. In options, I can choose to erase my existing game and can adjust the music and sound effects volume.

Once I'm in the game, my top DS screen shows a view of Holly's bedroom. The bottom screen looks like her desktop. She has a picture of her with Amy and Carrie, her two best friends in Clover, a calendar, a journal and a bunch of crayons.

Touch the picture, and you open a journal giving you info about the girls, their siblings and various pets. You will want to read through the information at least once if you intend to pass the Holly Hobbie trivia game/pop quiz later. According to the entry on Holly, she's 10 years old. I'm thinking your child would probably need to be in the 8 to 10 age range to really be able to follow Holly Hobbie & Friends. There's a lot of reading involved (and writing if the player chooses to use the journal). I don't see an early or pre-reader being able to play this game unless someone is over their shoulder at all times to read them the text — both for the story and for the game instructions.

Holly's journal actually has a few different purposes. In it, you'll find the high scores for any of the minigames already played. You'll see your status in the Hey Girls club that Holly and her friends put together. You also can create your own journal entries. You can't go too crazy with the journaling. You're given a total of 7,379 characters total — and this is for the whole journal, not per day. If you do want to write in the journal, you have a little qwerty keyboard and will tap out your entries with the DS stylus.

Holly's calendar is your entry into the minigame system. You begin on July 1. Each day will have a new minigame that is pretty much directly related to the story cutscenes. Your potential minigames are: pop quiz, bike riding, skating, baking cookies, dancing, market, making fruit salad, cooking pizza, making sandwiches, coloring posters, fruit juice stand, attic treasures, heart to heart and dress up.

I think it was a clever idea to have the minigame for each day related to the story. You talk about going on a picnic with your friends, for example, and your challenge is to make sandwiches. If you really like a given game and want to play it again, you just need to tap its day on the calendar.

Unfortunately, if you don't "pass" the minigame of the day, you can't progress and go to the next day. You will be put back to the beginning of that day, including having to tap through all the text exchanges. While you can skip the introductory story of the game, there's no way I've found to get through the text of each day any faster.

I found the difficulty of the various games to be pretty uneven, and there was no way to adjust the difficulty level. Beyond that, the instructions for each game aren't always terribly clear. The instructions for the market game tell you how to open your shopping list, how to select items and how to pay for your purchase. They don't tell you that the clock keeps running unless you walk Holly out of the store after she makes her purchase. Maybe that would be obvious to some people. I think it could have been made a little clearer.

The skating game was ridiculously easy — just dragging Holly around a circular track with the stylus. I found the cutting parts of any of the food preparation games to be incredibly hard. Again, the instructions aren't all that clear, and the game is not registering most of my cuts. I know my screen and stylus are fine because both work quite well with other games.

The game is pretty enough, and the music bounces along, but I worry about the uneven difficulty level of the various games. I am not a novice to DS games, and I can't make it past July 13 (Friday the 13th in the game, by the way). I'm sure Holly and her friends will have a lovely summer vacation, but they're going to have to enjoy it without me. I think along with being a Holly Hobbie fan, your child will need strong reading skills, good hand-eye coordination, problem-solving skills and a good dose of patience to get the most out of Holly Hobbie & Friends. If that sounds like your child (or well…any child), go ahead and give it a try.