Bob

Bob, by Wendy Mass and Rebecca Stead, is a quiet, odd, lovely story for 8 year olds about a promise nobody kept.

What happens

Livy has flown to Australia to stay with her gran. She was five the last time and she remembers almost nothing about the house. Not the green stuffed elephant. Not the bag of chess pieces. Not the horses.

Then she opens a small door in her bedroom closet and finds a short green person in a chicken suit, standing on a dictionary, holding a Lego pirate.

"You're back," he says. "Took you long enough."

His name is Bob. He isn't a zombie, although Livy told him he was when she was five (five-year-olds are very sure of themselves) and he's believed it ever since. He has waited in that closet for five years, because she asked him to.

The chapters swap between the two of them, and Bob's are the funniest thing here. He lists what he did while he waited. Counted to 987,654,321, six times. Built the same Lego pirate ship sixty-three times, in the dark. Read the dictionary as far as the letter T, because the light only reaches the closet for twenty-six minutes a day. Cried, but only twice a day, and only in the first year.

That's the tone all the way through. Something very funny, then one short line that stops you.

They set about working out what Bob actually is, which involves looking up zombie in the dictionary and being alarmed by the answer. Meanwhile the chicken suit, which Livy made out of her old orange pyjamas and some glue, turns out to work far better as a disguise than it has any right to.

There's a drought going on outside and it matters. Gran has no horses any more, the neighbours are close to losing their farm, and a small boy sits crying about it by the well.

Nothing in it is frightening, although Bob spends much of it worried that bits of him might drop off, which is funnier than it sounds.

What to read next

If they like a creature nobody can quite classify, The Unimaginary Friend makes a good next one. Ben Bunsen has exactly one friend, a figment of his imagination called the Gorblimey, and things get complicated when the figment turns up in his front room.