Read Extra Normal free in the Little Reads app.
Kate Alice Marshall's Extra Normal is a spooky, funny story for 11 year olds about the one ordinary kid in a very unusual family.
Charlie Greer has no powers at all. Everyone else in her house does. Little Opal is a ghost who floats through the ceiling. Matty turns into a wolf at the full moon. Gideon makes things fly across the room when he's upset (goodbye, picture frames). Mum is psychic, and both parents investigate ghosts and monsters for a secret government department.
So Charlie keeps everyone safe. She checks the fire extinguishers every week in case Opal has a nightmare. She reads stories to Matty through the basement door on full-moon nights. She hands Gideon plastic spoons when all the metal ones get bent.
Now Mum and Dad are finally going on holiday, after cancelling three times, and Charlie is determined that nothing will go wrong.
Then new neighbours move into the empty house across the road. That first night, Charlie sees them standing on their lawn in the dark. Mum, Dad and a boy about her age, all smiling at her house, with a strange flat shine in their eyes. Who stands around smiling like that?
It's a really fun mix. There's Miss Sinister, a cursed doll who steals passports and snacks on spiders. There's Agent Baxter, a very large man in a floral apron baking cookies for everyone. And there's a family friend who keeps texting about bringing back weapons as souvenirs.
Under the jokes, though, it's about Charlie. When she was little, her grandpa looked at her and called her entirely ordinary, and she's never quite shaken it off. If you've got an eldest child who's always the sensible one, they'll probably see themselves in her.
It does get properly creepy in places. Charlie still has nightmares about the time she was shut inside her parents' vault of cursed objects, and those smiling neighbours are VERY unsettling. For a reader who likes a shiver with their giggles, that's half the fun.
If the too-perfect neighbours are what grabs them, try Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Behind a locked door Coraline finds another mother who cooks her a wonderful lunch and has big black buttons for eyes.
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