Freddie Mole, Lion Tamer

Alexander McCall Smith's Freddie Mole, Lion Tamer is a warm, old-fashioned story for 7 year olds about an ordinary boy and a circus.

What happens

Freddie is about ten. Possibly a bit younger. Possibly a bit older. The book says it does not matter much, which tells you straight away what sort of narrator you have got.

What matters is that everybody likes him.

He lives with his dad Ted, who mends washing machines, and his much younger twin brother and sister, Ned and Bella. His mum works on ocean liners, making up the bunks and cleaning the cabins, and she is away for months on end. Sometimes a whole year.

There is a map of the world on the kitchen wall with a pin stuck in it, usually somewhere in the middle of a lot of blue.

Money is very tight. Ted works hard and his customers cannot pay much, and he also helps out his brother Stanley, who hurt his leg and has six children of his own. At the end of the month there might be enough left for half a loaf.

So Freddie daydreams about finding a diamond in the stream, or digging up gold, the way that man in the story did.

His dad tells him that good things sometimes happen when you least expect them, and that the important thing is never to give up hope. Then a friend turns up with a spare ticket for the circus.

It is a gentle book and the gentleness is deliberate. Nobody in it is cruel. The poverty is stated plainly and without any fuss, which makes it land harder, and the real ache in it is a mother who is not there.

If you've got a reader with a parent who works away a lot, this might be the one that finally gets it talked about.

Then the circus takes over and it gets funnier and quite a bit more alarming, because Freddie gets asked to be an understudy for the acts, and the title is not being coy about where that ends up.

The narrator also talks straight to you, dropping in lines like "we know, don't we", which makes it a very good one to read aloud.

What to read next

Harper and the Circus of Dreams takes the same idea somewhere stranger. That circus hangs in the sky under hot air balloons, and there is a girl who runs along a tightrope made of nothing at all.