Franny K. Stein 3 – The Invisible Fran

Jim Benton's The Invisible Fran is the third Franny K. Stein story, a madcap school comedy for 7 year olds about a girl who's sure everyone secretly wants to be a mad scientist.

What happens

Franny's lab has all the basics. An electron microscope. A nuclear-powered brain amplifier. A giant, flesh-eating koala. Her assistant is Igor, a dog who's part Lab, part poodle and part some kind of weaselly thing that isn't exactly a dog.

Then Miss Shelly asks everyone to bring their hobby into class. Erin does Irish dancing. Lawrence plays the accordion. Phil collects stamps. Billy bakes pretty, pretty cookies.

Franny is horrified. She asks Phil if he's ever thought about making his stamps explode when people lick them. (He hasn't.)

Nobody wants to help her finish her two-headed robot either. So she drinks an invisibility potion and creeps round the classroom whispering ideas into people's ears, until Erin, Lawrence and Phil think they're brilliant mad scientists all by themselves.

What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot, starting with a classroom smashed to smithereens (there's a handy note on how many smithereens make a smither, if your reader needs to do the conversion).

The jokes come thick and fast. The robot is twice as stupid as an ordinary robot, which is somehow worse than twice as clever. There are giant spit wads, a scribble on a door about the head teacher's bottom, and a terrible moment when Franny realises the robot is heading for the library. Not the books!

It's very cheeky, and a few jokes are a touch rude. The fighting is pure cartoon, even when the robot starts swinging its giant hand about.

Is there a lesson in it? Sort of. Franny might have one or two things to learn about other people's hobbies herself. But it never feels preachy, and the chapter headings are such awful puns that your reader will be groaning too much to notice.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, The Fran That Time Forgot has Franny winning first prize at the science fair. Then the head teacher reads out the full name on her certificate, middle name and all, and things get very complicated very quickly.