Read Give Peas a Chance free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Morris Gleitzman's Give Peas a Chance is a book of short funny stories for 9 year olds, mostly about children trying to sort out messes the adults have made.
In the first one, Jake gets a mission from his dad. Keep things quiet for a couple of hours. The twins were up all night and his parents are wrecked.
Jake takes this extremely seriously. He was recently voted the biggest daydreamer in year six, and this is his moment.
Out Of Order signs go up on the ping-pong table, the laundry, the ice machine, the swimming pool and all three holes of the crazy golf. He wedges the rattly drinks cabinet shut with cotton buds. Then he sits in the big leather chair and waits.
Three cars pull in. Units 7, 8 and 9, back early from the beach.
What follows is very funny and a bit pointed. These parents are scared of everything. A beach with no shark net. Pool water you would apparently need a microscope to trust. A child choking on a ping-pong ball. Their kids end up parked under the umbrellas with nothing to do, which Jake thinks is a real shame.
So he shows them the ants. Coastal racing ants, he explains. Very shy. They only race in absolute silence.
It works beautifully for about ninety seconds. Then the mums and dads notice.
That's the shape of these stories. A child with a sensible plan. Adults behaving considerably worse than the children. A last-minute idea that is either brilliant or about to make everything much worse.
The writing is a real help if your reader finds dense pages heavy going. The lines are short. There's a lot of white space. They can finish a whole story in one go and feel like they've properly read something.
It's Australian too, so there are footy fields and swimmers and spuds, which is no trouble at all and rather nice.
If that goes down well, Extra Time is another Australian kid refusing to let the grown-ups win. Bridie is the little sister, and when six big lads in orange shirts turn up to prove they're better than her brother, she's the one who answers them back.
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