Franny K. Stein – The Fran That Time Forgot

Jim Benton's The Fran That Time Forgot is a Franny K. Stein story for 7 year olds about a mad scientist who tries to fix the one problem she can't invent her way out of.

Franny is a Little Girl Mad Scientist. Her house is pink with purple shutters and everything about it is cheery, apart from the bedroom behind the small round window upstairs.

She has form. Zero Gravity Dog Food, so walking the dog is more fun. Cannibalistic Broccoli that eats itself, so nobody else has to. A hamster-powered trike she built at three.

Her mum tells her she can't have her cake and eat it too. Franny takes this as a challenge and builds a Time Warp Dessert Plate, which sends a small patch of the plate back to just before you ate the cake.

It wins first prize at the science fair, which is the problem, because the head teacher reads out the name on the certificate.

Franny Kissypie Stein.

Everybody laughs. (It was her dad's pet name for her mum, which Franny points out through gritted teeth, because who gets to choose their own name?)

Here's the thing about Franny though. She doesn't cry and she doesn't shrug it off either. She goes back in time to the hospital nursery and changes her own middle name on her baby chart.

Then, because she's curious, she has a quick look at the future. Teen Franny is up in the lab building a machine that makes monsters, and she is not planning to stop at one.

The chapters are very short and the headings are all terrible puns. It Was a Piece of Cake. One More Reason to Never Clean Your Room. The whole thing runs at a clip and finishes properly, which is a relief when your reader is still new to books without pictures on every page.

It's also more thoughtful than it looks. The name joke is funny, but Franny's answer to being laughed at is the real engine of the story, and your reader will spot what she got wrong before she does.

There's a five-eyed elephant monster, a Freeze Ray and a lot of shouting, and nobody is ever really in danger.

If they want more, Attack of the 50-Ft. Cupid is in the library. It's the one where Franny's mum decides every mad scientist needs a lab assistant and turns up with something on a lead.