Franny K. Stein 6 – The Fran with Four Brains

Jim Benton's The Fran with Four Brains is a Franny K. Stein story for 7 year olds about a very busy girl who builds three robot copies of herself to do her clubs for her.

What happens

Franny's week is FULL. There's school and homework, and a lab of experiments that need looking after every day (the bearded slugs need a shave each morning). On top of that there's football, gourmet cooking and bagpipe lessons.

One evening she's so frazzled that she milks the centipede, shaves the soy plant and very nearly runs a jillion volts through Igor by mistake. So she asks Mum if she can drop something. Anything!

But Mum has a good reason for every single club. Music teaches confidence, cooking teaches you to follow directions and football teaches teamwork. And above all, Franny must strive for excellence.

Teamwork, thinks Franny. Now there's an idea. She builds the Franbots, three wind-up robot Frannys, one for each activity. Then she tells them that nothing matters more than excellence.

You can probably see where this is going (Franny can't, not at first). The Franbots take her VERY seriously. Soon they've decided that anybody slowing them down has to be dealt with, starting with Franny herself.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

One of the robots zaps Igor into a tuna sandwich, and they talk about doing the same to Franny's whole family. It's all played for laughs, with lots of cartoon robot smashing, but a very soft-hearted reader might worry about Igor for a chapter or two. If yours likes their peril daft, they'll love it.

Underneath the silliness there's something a lot of families will recognise. Franny isn't lazy. She likes her clubs. She's just tired, and the mix-up in her lab is a very funny picture of a kid with too much on. Has your reader ever had a week where everything felt like a bit much?

Mum gets a look in too. The Franbots move so fast that she's running to keep up and staying up late helping with their extra projects.

The list of Franny's adventures at the back puts this one sixth. You don't need the others first, though, because Franny, Igor and the lab all get introduced from scratch.

What to read next

If they enjoy watching Franny take something Mum says and run off with it, The Fran That Time Forgot starts the same way. This time Mum tells her you can't have your cake and eat it too, and Franny invents a plate that proves her wrong in time for the school science fair.