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Sarah Courtauld's Buckle and Squash and the Land of the Giants is a daft fairy-tale romp for 7 year olds where a wish to be tiny goes very, very wrong.
It's the second Buckle and Squash book, and the two sisters couldn't be more different. Eliza wants to be a hero. She's been practising with her new bow and arrow for days (she hits everything except the target). Lavender wants to marry a prince.
So it's a disaster when the Village Crier announces that every prince in Squerb got married that morning. All fifty of them. One of them married a sheep.
Lavender doesn't give up, though. She heads off to a cottage by the Marsh of Unusual Smells, where three bickering witches sell her a snail for a button and a lump of old fudge. The snail talks. It grants wishes. And Lavender wishes to be tiny, so she can find a tiny magical prince.
That night the whole house starts to move. A giant called Too Big has picked it up and is marching off with it, with the girls, their nervous friend Bonnet and Gertrude the goat all still inside. And the other giants run away from HIM.
Where's he taking them? Up a beanstalk, to his daughter's fourth birthday party. She wanted a doll's house.
Honestly, this one is silly in the very best way. The book stops to talk to you ("doesn't this book have GIANTS in the title?"). Lavender's awful songs go on for verses. Bonnet, who's technically a giant but the size of a scone, is working through a list of over three thousand worries. And Gertrude keeps calmly eating people's socks.
If your reader loves the kind of joke where the story keeps swerving off to be ridiculous, they'll have a great time here. Two sisters who drive each other mad but always stick together is a nice thing to read about too.
If this one goes down well, Eliza, Lavender and Gertrude's earlier adventure is in the library as The Perilous Princess Plot. Lavender goes looking for a prince there too, and ends up needing her sister to ride to the rescue on the goat.
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