Fantastic Frankie and the Brain-Drain Machine

Anna Kemp's Fantastic Frankie and the Brain-Drain Machine is a daft, dastardly adventure for 7 year olds about a boy whose parents are sure he's a failure.

What happens

Frankie Blewitt is a dreamer. When he looks at his schoolbooks the letters jumble up, and his mind wanders off to flying helicopters and desert islands. So when his report comes home, his dad draws a big red F on it and tells him F stands for Fail.

Mr and Mrs Blewitt are VERY hard to please. Frankie's one real ally is Alphonsine, the family's French nanny. She's over eighty, rides a motorbike, takes a chainsaw to unruly trees and has a fearless poodle called Colette.

She also has a glass eye, which she pops out to show him. During the war she hid secret messages inside it for the French Resistance! Her stories are some of the funniest bits of the book (one mission involves her eyeball landing in an enemy officer's soup). Her big tip for bravery is to picture the bully with their pants on their head.

Then Frankie's dad finds the answer to everything. Crammar Grammar, a boarding school run by a scientist called Dr Gore. Frankie hatches a very itchy plan to escape the interview, involving Colette's fleas and his mum's new fur coat. It doesn't save him for long. Soon he's at a school with bricked-up windows, silent classrooms and exams on the very first day.

There's so much here to giggle at. Frankie's dad is properly mean in the early chapters, though, which is worth knowing. He drags Frankie by the ear, burns his toys on a bonfire (Colette rescues his teddy, Albert, just in time) and shoves him aside with his foot. The very first page also jokes about a prize-winning girl being eaten by a tiger.

The grown-ups are pantomime-villain awful and it's all played for laughs, so most readers will just cheer Frankie on. A child who'd be upset by a parent being unkind might like you nearby for the start.

Do you have a daydreamer who's been told to pay attention one too many times? They'll LOVE watching Frankie decide he's Fantastic.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, try Matilda. It's another story about a clever child whose mum and dad can't see how special she is.