Bah! Humbug!

Michael Rosen's Bah! Humbug! is a Christmas story for 8 year olds about a boy playing Scrooge with his own dad sitting out in the audience.

What happens

Harry Gruber is eleven and he's got the lead in the school's A Christmas Carol. He begged to bring the half mask home overnight so he could practise his sneering in the mirror. Then he left it somewhere in the house, and his father starts on him in the car before they've even pulled away.

Ray Gruber runs a website. Ray Gruber is always about to make it big. Ray Gruber would rather not be at a school play on Christmas Eve.

The book runs two things alongside each other. The play itself, set out as a script, with Dickens and Scrooge and Marley's ghost in the real Victorian words. And the Gruber family in the hall watching it, or in Ray's case leaving halfway through, because a deal in Mumbai is happening now.

That sounds like a gimmick and it isn't. It's the whole point of the thing. Scrooge is up on stage being shown his own past while Harry's dad is out in an industrial unit in a thunderstorm, in the dark, telling a colleague the one story about his parents and money that he has never told anybody.

Harry's little sister Eva is the one to watch. She's been playing all the other parts in rehearsal at home, so she knows every line by heart, and she sits there loving her brother and noticing everything the grown ups assume she hasn't.

Rosen keeps Dickens's language whole and it's glorious read aloud. Solitary as an oyster. More of gravy than of grave about you. A child who only knows the songs will be surprised by how funny the original is, and how vicious.

Which brings the caution. Scrooge tells a charity collector that the poor had better die and decrease the surplus population, and tells his own nephew he'd rather see him in hell. Marley's ghost is properly ghastly, chained and moaning. And in the modern half, Ray keeps seeing the face of his best friend from school, who died young in an accident the book describes plainly.

Two small things. The copy in the library is the American edition, so it's Mom and cell phone and pop quiz throughout. And it's a Christmas book, so you may want to save it.

What to read next

If your reader gets on with a classic dragged into a school hall, Unexpected Twist is also here. Same Miss Cavani, same class, and this time it's Oliver Twist they're reading in English.