Daisy and the Trouble with Sports Day

Kes Gray's Daisy and the Trouble with Sports Day is a school story for 6 year olds about a girl who ends up running a race for three.

What happens

Daisy's whole school is going for gold. Mr Copford turns up to Monday assembly in a red tracksuit and white trainers, with a whistle round his neck, and holds up the Sports Day cup.

Daisy wants the sixty metre sprint. So does everybody. Then she wants the multi skills. So does everybody, and the whole class falls over trying to get their hands highest.

What she gets is the egg and spoon.

The trouble with the egg and spoon, Daisy explains, is that it's a race with an egg and a spoon, which makes it really difficult to race, because eggs and spoons are so wobbly.

Every chapter runs on that joke and it never gets old. The trouble with sports whistles. The trouble with foam javelins (they're made of foam, which isn't a proper metal). The trouble with lifting your bottom off the grass while you're cross legged.

Daisy tells the whole thing herself, at top speed, with total confidence and no accuracy whatsoever. She is quite certain she's the fastest girl in her class. The evidence says seventh. She also explains to her mother that eggs do grow on trees, because birds grow on trees and birds have eggs inside them.

The best stretch is the training. Twelve raw eggs on a kitchen floor. A mum who slips over in eight of them while holding a watering can. A Go for Gold Eating Plan built entirely on Mars bars, cheese strings and dry roasted peanuts, which her mother declines to buy.

Then Gabby comes off a skateboard into a lamppost, and Daisy is suddenly carrying everybody's hopes. Gabby's. Gabby's teddy's. It's a surprisingly true bit of writing about how a lovely idea turns into a weight, and Daisy stops sleeping over it.

One thing about the shelf. There's nothing in here a younger reader shouldn't meet. But it's a proper chapter book with a lot of pages and a very talkative narrator, so it's a treat read aloud and a solo read for a child already comfortable with a long stretch of text.

Two small warnings. Nobody comes off well in the name calling (Daisy gets called an egg on legs and gives back much better), and Gabby's whistle nearly goes down her throat.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, the boy with the new trainers and the sports chewing gum gets a whole book of his own. In Daisy and the Trouble with Jack, Mrs Peters sits the two of them next to each other, and you get his side of things as well as hers.