Read Franny K. Stein 2 – Attack of the 50-Ft. Cupid free in the Little Reads app.
Jim Benton's Attack of the 50-Ft. Cupid is a mad science story for 7 year olds about a dog who only ever wanted to help.
Franny K. Stein lives in a bright pink house with purple shutters, and the only gloomy bit of it is the upstairs bedroom where she does her experiments.
Nobody at home takes her seriously. She shows her dad a cow she has bred small enough to carry about and he says "That's nice, Franny" without looking up from his paper.
So her mum finds her a lab assistant. It turns out to be a dog. Part poodle, part Chihuahua, part beagle, part something that isn't quite a dog at all, and his name is Igor.
Franny is not impressed, but she can see how pleased her mum is, so she says he's perfect and puts him in a corner.
Then it's valentines at school, and Franny has no idea what one is. Her teacher explains Cupid to her. A little naked chap with wings who flies about shooting people and says something mushy.
Franny takes notes. Mushy, she thinks. Well, intestines are mushy.
Her classmates scream. Miss Shelly hands her a real valentine so she can see what everyone actually means, and Franny takes it home to study.
That night Igor is allowed to touch nothing except his rubber ball. So of course he goes for the ball, knocks it off the table, and it bounces onto the switch of a machine that turns pictures into real things.
Out drops a tiny Cupid, firing tiny arrows. One of them pings off the Biggerizer.
Your reader can guess what happens to a Cupid then, and the sight of a pink baby the size of a house drifting over the rooftops with a bow is worth the wait.
It's told in very short chapters with terrible puns for titles, so it moves quickly even for a reader who is still building up stamina. The whole thing is one sitting on the sofa.
There's one moment that stings. Franny loses her temper completely and tells Igor to be gone by the time she gets back, and he sits there wondering where sad, ugly, good-for-nothing little dogs are supposed to go. Soft-hearted children may need a hand through that page.
This is the second Franny K. Stein story, going by the series line on its copyright page, and it makes no assumptions about the first.
If your reader wants another run at Franny's inventions, The Fran That Time Forgot is in the library. This time it's the science fair, and the middle name she has kept quiet about for years gets said out loud in front of the whole school.
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