Franny K. Stein 1 – Lunch Walks Among Us

Jim Benton's Lunch Walks Among Us is the first Franny K. Stein story, a gloriously gross mad-science comedy for 7 year olds about a girl who tries very hard to be normal.

What happens

Franny lives in a pretty pink house at the end of Daffodil Street. Everything about it is bright and cheery, apart from her bedroom. That's dark and spooky, with test tubes, a tarantula cage and a tank of flying piranhas. (Her mum keeps sneaking in to add daisies. They never last the night.)

The trouble is school. Franny is new, and the other children are a bit scared of her. Her lunches look nothing like theirs, her dolls bite the heads off other dolls, and nobody can ever find her at hide-and-seek.

She'd really like some friends. So her teacher, Miss Shelly, suggests she treats it like an experiment. And what mad scientist could say no to that?

Franny takes careful notes. Squashy white sandwiches. Dolls that don't ooze. A bat can also be a big stick you hit a ball with! Then she mixes a potion and turns herself into a sweet little girl with cute hair and adorable shoes.

It sort of works. But the crab ravioli she threw in the classroom bin has been sitting there with some old gym shoes, a lump of chewed gum and a dollop of unstable industrial waste. You can probably guess what climbs out.

This is very silly in the best way. The chapters are short and the headings are terrible puns (Ham, I Am is a favourite). There's also a running joke about one poor boy who keeps wetting his pants, which will have some readers howling and others rolling their eyes.

Underneath all the goo there's something very real, though. Who hasn't been the new kid and wondered whether it's worth pretending to be someone else to fit in? Franny's version just involves a lot more slime.

What to read next

If it's the notebook and the experiments they love, Ada Twist and the Disappearing Dogs has another girl scientist with a head full of questions. When pets start vanishing all over town, Ada gets out her notebook, comes up with a hypothesis and builds a trap in her front garden to test it.