Glubbslyme

Jacqueline Wilson's Glubbslyme is a funny, magical story for 8 year olds about a lonely girl and a very rude toad.

What happens

It's the summer holidays and Rebecca's best friend Sarah keeps going off with her next-door neighbour, a girl with real lipstick who calls Rebecca Parrot Face. So Rebecca does something daft to prove a point. She wades into the park pond in her best dress.

Something grabs her ankle. It's an enormous, warty black toad. And it talks!

He's Glubbslyme, and hundreds of years ago he belonged to a real witch who lived by that pond. He's grand and snooty and very easily offended (never, ever call him ugly). He can also make the sun come out, which is handy when your dress is soaking.

So Rebecca takes him home in a carrier bag. Cue chaos. He thinks cars are roaring monsters, the telly is witchcraft and her old teddy on the stairs is a real bear. A bubble bath turns into a splashing war that drips through the kitchen ceiling just as Dad gets home.

It's laugh-out-loud stuff, and Glubbslyme's old-fashioned way of talking is half the fun ("Desist!"). Your reader will probably be doing his voice by bedtime. He's a bit of a menace too. He loves a trick, and when the grumpy man next door is nasty about Rebecca's family, the two of them cook up some magic of their own.

Underneath the silliness there's lots of heart. Rebecca lives with her Dad and doesn't have a Mum any more. She loves him to bits, but he's at work and she's on her own a lot. Glubbslyme is the first friend in ages who's all hers. Anyone who's been dropped by a best friend will know exactly how that feels.

One or two darker moments are worth a mention. Rebecca makes up gory stories about witches being tortured and ducked in the pond, and Glubbslyme is still grieving for his witch, who drowned there. Rebecca also still cries sometimes about the guinea pig she forgot to feed. None of it lingers.

What to read next

If they like a story about friendship troubles, Bad Girls is Jacqueline Wilson too, about a girl who gets picked on every day by three girls, one of whom used to be her friend.