Greta Zargo and the Amoeba Monsters from the Middle of the Earth

A. F. Harrold's Greta Zargo and the Amoeba Monsters from the Middle of the Earth is a very silly adventure for 9 year olds about a girl reporter with a huge story at the bottom of her garden.

What happens

Greta lives on her own. (A spelling mistake in her parents' will let her move out at eight instead of eighteen, which tells you what kind of book this is.) She's an unpaid junior reporter for The Local Newspaper and she's always after a Big Story.

It's half-term. She cycles off grumpily to cover her Aunt Tabitha's Festival of New Stuff, a gathering of inventors at a stately home. Someone has written Cancelled on the sign. Aunt Tabitha has vanished, and so have the keys to the main hall.

So Greta starts interviewing people. There's an inventor from Wyoming whose cow makes burgers. There's an octopus in a reverse diving suit. There are twin scientists and the clone they grew in a jar in their shed, who keeps putting his foot in it.

Meanwhile, back in Greta's garden, something wobbly and jelly-like is climbing out of a very deep hole. Greta hasn't noticed.

The jokes come thick and fast, and loads of them live in the footnotes. Your reader will keep flicking to the bottom of the page to find out where fog goes, or why the man with the cow only looks at you with one eye. It's the kind of daft you end up reading out loud.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The amoeba monsters swallow people whole and digest them, on the page. A retired brigadier goes first, then the town's only policeman, while the neighbours watch through binoculars and then pop off to play rounders. A cat ends up as a floating skeleton. Greta's best friend Jessica gets swallowed too. There's also a joke about a book series where two schoolgirls do away with their teachers.

It's all played for laughs and nobody seems very bothered. For a child who finds that sort of thing hilarious, it will be. For a worrier, or an animal lover who'd be upset by the cat, it might be one to save for later.

What to read next

If it's the footnotes and the grown-ups who make no sense that they love, The Boy Who Ran Away From the Circus is A. F. Harrold again. Fizzlebert lives in a circus, he's the only kid there, and his best friend is a sea lion.