Amelia Fang and the Trouble With Toads

Laura Ellen Anderson's Amelia Fang and the Trouble With Toads is a gross-out monster adventure for 7 year olds about a big sister who loses her baby brother somewhere she isn't allowed to follow.

What happens

Amelia is a young vampire. Her baby brother Vincent is the slimiest, pongiest thing she has ever known.

He's eaten her homework. He's chewed a hole in her favourite pumpkin dress. He's left bum-prints on her pumpkin magazines.

So a whole weekend at her best friend Grimaldi's birthnight party, with no Vincent in it, sounds perfect. Then Mum catches the Frankenflu, and Vincent has to come too.

What follows is one party slowly wrecked by one baby. He farts all through dinner. He's sick during the film. He rips up the comics. And when Amelia finally shouts that he ruins EVERYTHING, his eyes fill up.

Then, out on a walk in the Petrified Forest, he rolls away.

The trail of snot stops at a sign reading TOADS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. Beyond those reeds is where reapers send squished toads to start their second life, and Grimaldi's phone says one extra has gone through. Once you go through, there's no way back.

Amelia goes anyway. Her friends put on green outfits and go with her.

The jokes are relentless and mostly about bodily functions, so if your reader is at the age where a fart is the funniest thing in the world, this will land. The toad paradise turns out to be spotlessly clean and obsessed with lemons, which is very funny when you've smuggled in a baby covered in snot.

Underneath the silliness there's something quite tender. Amelia spends the whole search feeling like an awful big sister. She keeps looking at the shiny pebbles and thinking how much Vincent would have loved to slobber on them.

The setting is an afterlife, which you might want to know about before you start. The toads are there because they've been squished, and they mention it as cheerfully as you'd mention moving house. Nothing sad happens to any of them and it's played entirely for laughs. If your reader is at the stage of asking big questions about what happens when things die, though, you might want to be within reach for that bit.

What to read next

If the four friends are the part they love, Amelia Fang and the Lost Yeti Treasures takes the same gang off to Florence's grand-yeti's three hundred and fiftieth birthday, where the ancient yetis' glittery treasures start going missing.