Diggers

Terry Pratchett's Diggers is an adventure for 9 year olds about very small people living in an abandoned quarry, and the piece of paper that turns up to ruin everything.

What happens

The nomes are there because of something that happened before this book starts. They talk about the Store, and the Long Drive, and the Truck, the way you'd talk about last summer. Nobody stops to explain it. That's something to be ready for if your reader likes starting at the very beginning, although the gist arrives fast enough.

Winter is coming and Masklin is worried. Masklin is always worried. He's roughly in charge, and he has worked out the first rule of being in charge. If everything seems to be going right, something is going wrong that you haven't heard about yet.

Then a human drives up to the quarry gate in a Land-Rover, sticks a piece of paper on it and drives away again.

Grimma reads it out. Somebody is reopening the quarry, for a highway extension. Which means somebody is coming to make the hole bigger. Which means their home.

The real pleasure is watching nomes reason about a world they only half understand. Rain is a sprinkler system. Level crossing gates are obviously there to stop the trains escaping off their rails. Snow is glittery and comes with robins, because that's what was on the cards in the Store.

Humans are enormous, slow and mostly harmless. Right up until one of them produces a bit of paper. Paper is the thing the nomes have learned to be frightened of, because a piece of paper is what demolished the Store.

It's very funny about people, too. Granny Morkie thoroughly enjoys doom and keeps explaining that this isn't proper cold yet. Gurder the Abbot can read every single word of the notice, he just can't work out what any of the sentences mean. Masklin sits on his favourite stone in the rain, having what he calls a serious think about his position in things and everyone else calls a sulk.

One thing to flag. Masklin and Gurder come out with some very dim opinions about women, that girls should do as they're instructed and that reading makes their brains overheat. The book is laughing at them, not agreeing. Grimma is the one who can actually read the notice, and Granny Morkie's answer is that she wishes she'd thought of not doing as she was told. If your reader can hear a joke made at the speaker's expense, it lands. If they're likely to take it straight, that's a page worth reading together.

What to read next

If the nomes get their hooks in, Wings is in the library too. It takes the worry Masklin can't put down here all the way to the airport, where three of them end up in a rubbish bin, eating a cold chip and wondering how on earth you get onto a plane.