Danny Danger and the Cosmic Remote

Adam Frost's Danny Danger and the Cosmic Remote is a funny adventure for 7 year olds about a boy whose birthday present can pause, rewind and fast-forward time.

What happens

Danny's parents aren't big on birthdays. Their present to him was a bottle of detergent. (His sister gave him a book about horses and then borrowed it.) The one good present arrived in a little wooden crate covered in strange stamps, from his mysterious Uncle Charlie.

It looks like a small remote control with seven buttons and a crystal in the back. What it controls is TIME.

So when his maths teacher demands to know what five times five times five is, Danny presses Pause. He strolls out of the frozen classroom, finds a calculator in the library cupboard and comes back with the answer. When his mum threatens to throw everything in his room into a skip, he stops the world and carries the lot across the road to his best friend Eric's house. It takes about fifty trips.

This is the daydream every child has had, and it's brilliantly done. Who hasn't wanted to pause a telling-off?

The Danger family are a very Dahl-ish bunch. The house is spotless, there are framed tea towels with bossy mottos on the walls, and Danny gets the blame for everything. He gets his own back, too. One freeze-frame involves an undone shoelace, a nudged hall table and a rug with its corner kicked up, and it's pure slapstick when time starts again (Dad ends up with a bucket on his head).

It isn't all mischief, though. Uncle Charlie warned him to tell nobody about the remote. Then a pair of big yellow eyes appears at his bedroom window one night. And a huge fish, half animal and half machine, rises out of the park pond and very nearly hypnotises him into throwing the remote into its mouth. Someone wants it badly, and a villain known as the Night Scientist wants it for himself.

Those bits are a little creepy, more shivery than scary, and Danny always has a Rewind button to fall back on.

If you've got a reader who loves a bit of naughtiness and a secret power, Danny could be their new favourite.

What to read next

For another child with truly hopeless parents, try Roald Dahl's Matilda. Mr and Mrs Wormwood treat their brilliant little girl as a nuisance and won't even buy her a book, so she takes herself off to the library.