Boy in the Biscuit Tin

Heather Dyer's Boy in the Biscuit Tin is a home-made magic story for 7 year olds about a girl whose cousin has been shrunk to the size of a doll.

What happens

Ibby is being left at her Aunt Carole's for four days while her parents go to a conference in Cardiff. She's quiet, she's a big reader, and she is always good. She says so herself, flatly, as her mother tells her to be.

Her cousins are the opposite. Alex is nearly a teenager, tidy, and full of facts he's very pleased with. Francis can't help looking untidy and once got his finger stuck in a shower drain, so the ambulance men had to carry him off with the shower tray still attached to the end of it.

They've been up in the loft and come down with a magic set that's been sitting there for years.

Ibby goes up to find Francis and the room is empty. There's just a black top hat rolling gently across the carpet, as though its owner left in a hurry.

Then, in Francis's bedroom, Alex is on his knees by the bed. Shut the door, he says. Don't let it get away. Some sort of mouse. With stripes.

Ibby catches it in her cupped hands, and it's Francis, curled up in a ball, wearing his stripy jumper.

Into the biscuit tin he goes, because it's the only thing with a lid, and immediately he starts running round and round the shiny sides trying to get out.

What follows is exactly what would happen if this really happened in your house. The boys are interested. Ibby is worried sick. Alex offers the helpful information that shrews starve to death within the hour, which is not what anyone needed.

It's very funny and very English. Every chapter opens with a line from the magic set's own instruction booklet, promising to astonish your friends, and the gap between that cheerful advertising voice and the small frightened boy in the tin is where most of the comedy sits.

Ibby's the good one who's never in trouble, and the story keeps quietly pointing out that being good is no use at all when you're the only person in the room actually thinking.

You might want to know that a small child is trapped and scared for a while, and that the older boys treat it as a problem to poke at rather than an emergency. That's the joke, and a reader who worries about people will still feel it. If yours is the sort who wants somebody sensible in charge, Ibby is that person and she's on the case from page one.

What to read next

If a magic object turning up in an ordinary house is the appeal, Witch's Broom starts with a little blue broom that nobody in the street will claim, found in a back garden and taken indoors to sweep up spilt buttons.