Read Franny K. Stein 10 – Mood Science free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Jim Benton's Mood Science is a gloriously silly Franny K. Stein story for 7 year olds about a girl who takes her own feelings out and sends them off to play.
It all starts with Granny's soup. Lots of good things mixed together make something better, she tells Franny. So Franny builds the Mixer-Upper Machine out of a broken blender and an old nuclear reactor (as you do).
Mixing a substitute teacher with a ruler gets you a foot-long sub, who is NOT happy about it. Mixing a duck with a beaver gets you a platypus, and Franny is furious. We already have those!
Then her temper really goes. She sends equipment flying and kicks over the jigsaw Igor has spent weeks on, just as he's about to put the last piece in. He walks away in tears.
She feels terrible for days. So she decides the problem isn't what she did, it's how she feels about it. And she climbs into the machine to unmix herself.
Out step Angry-Fran, Scaredy-Fran, Sad-Fran and Silly-Fran, and they're brilliant. Sad-Fran blows bubbles and cries when they pop. Silly-Fran digs a hole so she's got somewhere to put the dirt. Plain Franny, with nothing left to feel, flops on the sofa and watches TV for days.
Which is a shame, because a toad from one of her old experiments has escaped. Soon there's a very catching illness on the news and people are turning into toads (Mum included). Franny just shrugs.
It's very silly and very clever. Each little Fran is so exactly herself that kids will be giggling the whole way through. There's something real in it too, about how even the grumpy feelings are there for a reason. Which Fran would your reader be?
Franny is properly unkind to Igor early on, and the whole middle of the story is a disease spreading around the world, with people on the TV upset about their families. It's all cartoon and it's played for laughs. A child who's been anxious about illness might still like you nearby for those chapters. Most will just enjoy the toads.
This is the tenth Franny K. Stein book, but it reads perfectly well on its own.
If they like watching Franny wrestle with her own temper, The Fran That Time Forgot is a great one to try. The whole school laughs at her middle name and she's so cross that she builds a time machine to go back and change it.
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