Read Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again free in the Little Reads app.
Frank Cottrell Boyce's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again is a road trip comedy for 9 year olds about a very ordinary family and a very unordinary engine.
The Tootings are not amazing. Their car is not amazing either. It is so completely unamazing that Lucy and Jem walk straight past it outside school without noticing.
Then Dad announces he has Big News, buys a takeaway to celebrate, and tells them he has been sacked. Hooray!
His fingers, he explains, are too big for the tiny parts he has spent twenty years making at Very Small Parts for Very Big Machines.
So now they can go anywhere. Paris for Mum. The pyramids for Lucy, who is fifteen, dresses entirely in black, and would like to sit in the desert thinking about dead pharaohs. El Dorado for Jem, who was actually making a point about how easy it is to get lost. The North Pole for Dad, who is holding the map upside down.
Half an hour later a smiling young man knocks and takes the car back, because it belonged to the company.
Now Dad has nothing but time, and this is where the book becomes properly funny. He decides to improve the house.
Lucy wakes up to blue daisy wallpaper and her skull shaped lamp melting because he fitted a stronger bulb. Jem wakes up to a Scalextric track soaring over his bed, and a car flying off a bend into his father's forehead. Little Harry, who is a baby and just wants his lost dinosaur, gets voice activated toys that play with him whether he likes it or not, including a felt snake with a firm grip.
Dad announces the word of the day every morning. The word today is home improvement. Lucy points out that is two words. Not if you say it fast, says Dad.
Everything eventually points at a camper van and a salvaged old engine, which turns out to have opinions about what should be bolted to it. But the joy of the first half is just watching a man with no job and infinite optimism let loose on his own house.
It is very kind underneath the silliness. Mum takes the map out of the recycling because she is proud of him. That is the sort of family this is.
For what the Tootings do next, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Over the Moon strands them at the 1966 World Cup Final with the car stolen and Little Harry taken with it.
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