Love from Paddington

Michael Bond's Love from Paddington is a funny book for 7 year olds told through the letters Paddington writes home to Aunt Lucy in Peru.

What happens

It begins with Aunt Lucy smuggling her nephew onto a ship with a suitcase full of marmalade and a label tied round his neck. Before he sails she makes him promise one thing. He has to write!

So he does. Each letter starts "Dear Aunt Lucy" and goes straight into whatever has gone wrong lately (something usually has).

The first few tell how he got here. There's the bath he floods almost as soon as he arrives at the Browns' (the water comes through the ceiling below). There's the label asking someone to look after him, and the railway station that gave him his name.

Then life at 32 Windsor Gardens really gets going. He wallpapers his new bedroom by himself and ends up covered in most of it. He buys a box of old carpentry tools at an auction just by raising his hat at the wrong moment. And a trip to the bank to check on his savings alarms him so much that he dials 999.

What makes it such a treat is that it's all in Paddington's own words. He's very polite and very sure he's got the right end of the stick. When Mr Brown books a box at the theatre, Paddington assumes it's something to stand on. Your reader will often see the joke coming before he does, which is half the fun.

His spelling isn't great either. Judy types his very first letter, and in the next one she pops in a correction or two (anxious comes out as "ankshush"). It's a lovely one to read aloud.

And who could resist a bear who gets out of the Hampton Court maze in record time by leaving marmalade chunks on the hedges?

Each letter is its own little story, so it's very easy to dip into one or two at bedtime. There's no real villain either, unless you count grumpy Mr Curry next door, who's always after something for nothing.

You don't need to know the other Paddington books to enjoy this. If your reader already does, it's fun hearing his side of things, which isn't always quite how everyone else remembers it.

What to read next

If they'd like to see the Browns' side of that first meeting, A Bear Called Paddington opens on the very same railway platform, with Mr Brown trying to convince his wife that he really has just seen a bear.