Blob

Blob by David Walliams is a short, daft, surprisingly kind story for 8 year olds about a boy who gets called names and a fish that nobody wants to look at.

What happens

Bob is ten and about to turn eleven. He has what the book calls a funny face, and some of the children at school use worse words than that.

He lives with his grandpa in a tiny flat. Money is very tight. The one treat of the year is a birthday trip to the zoo, and this year the piggy bank holds three coppers and a chipped button.

So Bob climbs a tree outside the zoo instead, to see the animals over the wall. A kindly zookeeper called Winston spots him and sneaks him in through the back gate.

Bob walks straight past the lion and the elephant. He always does. The animals he comes for are the ones nobody stops at.

In a dark corner there's a little tank with a sign on it and, as far as anyone can tell, nothing inside. The blobfish has been hiding at the back of it for two years. A girl took one look at him once and was sick on the glass.

Bob taps anyway. The fish comes out. They frighten the life out of each other.

Next day a bully called Stubbs finds him in the school library with a book open at the blobfish page, and makes the obvious joke. Bob does something rather brilliant with it. He doesn't cry. He pulls the face, blows a bubble, and swims out of the library with everyone laughing, including the librarian.

Then he goes back to the zoo to teach the fish the same trick.

It is written to be read out loud. Big shouty capitals, silly footnotes, and a joke about zoo muck roughly every other page. Your reader will want to do the voices.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The bullying is not one scene, it runs through the book, and it is about the way Bob looks. There is a list of things the gang have done to him that includes making him drink tea out of his own sock and eat a cracker smeared with their foot cheese. The word ugly comes up a great deal, and a reference book in the story flatly calls the blobfish the ugliest animal in the world.

Bob wins, and he wins by being funny rather than by being rescued, which is a good thing to watch. But if yours has been on the receiving end of name-calling about their face, this one could land hard or land exactly right. You'll probably know which.

What to read next

If the part that sticks is Bob noticing the one everybody else walks past, Mr Stink does the same thing with people. Chloe is the only person in town willing to stop and talk to the tramp on the bench, and she has her own reasons for feeling like she doesn't fit anywhere.