Charlie and Me: 421 Miles from Home

Mark Lowery's Charlie and Me: 421 Miles from Home is a runaway story for 9 year olds about two brothers, one train ticket and something the older one will not say out loud.

What happens

It is quarter to seven on a Saturday morning. Martin is thirteen. His little brother Charlie is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the corner shop with his eyes shut, charging up the laser in his belly button.

They are going to Cornwall. Charlie does not know that yet.

Their parents do not know either. Martin has a wad of twenty pound notes, the special Christmas biscuit tin he took from the kitchen, and a phone deliberately left at home in his sock drawer. Charlie spotted him hiding it, obviously. Charlie spots everything.

Charlie is wonderful company. He was born fifteen weeks early and spent three months in hospital, and he has approached life at full tilt ever since. He shaved his own eyebrows off at four because they were freaking him out. He invented a number called a Charlillion, which is one more than infinity. He once came home with a note explaining he had missed his spelling test because he was pretending to be a tortoise.

He also has asthma, a patch over his good eye to make the lazy one work, and no sense of danger whatsoever. Which is why Martin has spent ten years holding his hand at crossings.

Martin's head is a very good place to be. He counts distances because breaking a big frightening thing into little bits makes it manageable, and every chapter is headed with the stage, the miles and how they are covering them, starting with the 1.5 from their street to Preston station. Between chapters he writes poems. They are properly good.

He is also lying to a ticket clerk, watching two police officers out of the corner of his eye, and getting headaches that stop him mid-sentence.

You should know what you are handing over. The cover asks how far you would travel to say goodbye, and it is not joking. Martin is carrying something. You feel it long before it arrives, and the closer the train gets the heavier it presses. Long stretches are very funny. It is still a book about losing somebody, so if your reader has lost someone recently, leave this one for a while. For a child who can hold the laughing and the ache at once, it is superb.

One oddity about this edition. The story is set in Preston and the boys live on Jammie Dodgers, but the text says cookies, vacation and second grade. Your reader may blink at that for a page or two.

What to read next

If this one lands, The Boy Who Sailed the Ocean in an Armchair gives you Becket, woken at midnight and driven away in his dad's fish van with his little brother and no chance to say goodbye to anyone, and absolutely determined to fix it.