Ada Twist and the Perilous Pants

Andrea Beaty's Ada Twist and the Perilous Pants is a science-packed adventure for 6 year olds about a girl who can't stop asking why.

What happens

Ada Twist is a scientist. Before breakfast is even over, she's measuring how far away she can smell her mum's coffee (twelve centimetres, if you were wondering). Why doesn't her dad's coffee smell of anything at all?

By mid-morning she's borrowed her big brother Arthur's tennis shoes for an experiment. One is heated up with hard-boiled eggs. The other has a purple ice lolly stuffed inside it. Arthur is NOT impressed.

Then, out birdwatching, Ada hears a call she doesn't recognise. It's not a bird. It's Uncle Ned, floating above the tree in a gigantic pair of trousers filled with helium. Uncle Fred let go of his rope when he spotted a snake.

So Ada and her friends Rosie and Iggy set off across town after him. Just how high will a pair of balloon trousers float? Could he float all the way into space? And how do you get a man down when no ladder will reach?

The best thing about Ada is that her ideas all want to come out at once. She points and zooms and makes sound effects, and everyone just looks confused. Watching her find better ways to explain (drawing pictures in her notebook helps a lot) is a gentle, lovely thread through the whole book.

Even her mum doesn't get it at first. Ada keeps a list of the rules her parents have given her, and it's very funny. The bathroom is not a science lab. The pantry is not an ant farm.

There's real science in here too. Ada reads up on air, gases and smells, and bits of her books appear on the page, along with a nerdy guide to birds. It's all explained in a way that makes sense to a young reader, and the helium problem actually hangs on it.

If you've got a reader who asks why about EVERYTHING, they'll find a friend in Ada. It's also a nice one for any child who knows exactly what they mean but can't quite get the words out in the right order.

What to read next

Rosie gets a mission of her own in Rosie Revere and the Raucous Riveters, with Ada and Iggy helping out and a snake-scaring invention that keeps going wrong.