Read A Boy Called Hope free in the Little Reads app.
A Boy Called Hope by Lara Williamson is a funny story for 9 year olds about a boy whose dad walked out years ago and has just turned up on the telly.
Dan Hope keeps a list in his head of things he'd like to happen. Some are easy enough. He'd quite like the dog to give up eating his toy planets and being sick on the carpet.
Some are less likely. He'd like his sister to head off to university somewhere freezing and only come home once a year.
And right at the bottom of the list, the big one. He'd like his dad to love him.
Then one perfectly ordinary Monday evening, Dan is halfway through a peanut butter sandwich when Dad appears on the television. He's a presenter now. He's been gone four years.
Dan decides this is brilliant news. He'll be famous by association! The dinner ladies will give him extra chips. Girls will write Mrs Dan Hope in their notebooks.
His sixteen year old sister Grace does not agree, and she says so at some volume. Dan calls her Ninja Grace because she fights with words and she always wins.
What makes this one really work is how Dan tells it. The jokes come thick and fast, and you can usually see what they're covering up.
He describes the night his dad left through the bits a seven year old would actually notice. The gristle in the cottage pie. His bum going numb on the stairs. The daffodils on the wallpaper shaking when the front door slammed.
His friends are excellent value too. Jo collects saint relics and brushes her teeth in holy water so that only kind words come out (they don't). Christopher has a hamster called Boo.
You should know that Dan's parents split up because his dad left with someone else, and that Dan overheard the row. That's all established early on rather than saved up as a shock.
If your reader has a parent who isn't around, some of it may land quite close to home. Dan spends a lot of the book talking to his dad through a TV screen and getting nothing back.
For a child who can handle that, his voice is brilliant company and very funny about a genuinely sad thing.
Got on with Dan? Lara Williamson does the same trick in The Boy Who Sailed the Ocean in an Armchair. Becket is eleven, his mum died when he was four, and his dad has just driven him and his little brother away in the middle of the night without letting them say goodbye to anyone.
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