Here’s Hank – Hooray! My Butt Left the Bench!

Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver's Hooray! My Butt Left the Bench is a school story for 6 year olds about a boy who is hopeless at basketball and desperate to play anyway.

What happens

Hank Zipzer is at lunch, planning the First-Ever Hank Zipzer Uphill Worm Sprint, when his two best friends tell him they've been picked for the school team. Nobody asked Hank.

There are open spots, though. All he has to do is go and ask the coach.

The coach is Ms Adolf. Hank reckons she looks like she swallowed a lemon. Her hair is grey, her clothes are grey, her face is grey. Even her breath is grey.

She asks him four questions. Can you shoot? Can you rebound? Can you jump high? Can you dribble? Hank answers no, no, no, and "only from my mouth".

The tryout goes exactly as well as you'd expect. The ball rolls off across the court without him. He falls over twice. His big shot sails up in a lovely arc and takes a left turn near Ms Adolf's head.

He gets a place on the team anyway. Sort of. The jerseys were ordered before he was picked, so he gets an old number 13 T-shirt that comes down below his knees.

That bit might land harder than you expect. Standing in a team photo in the wrong shirt is a very specific kind of awful, and Hank knows it.

The pleasure of it is being inside Hank's head. He isn't trying to be funny and he's funny constantly, mostly because he says the thing everyone else is thinking. He keeps pickle juice in his backpack to keep his nose happy!

Hank also gets three out of ten in his spelling test (two of them are his name), and presses phone numbers in the wrong order because his brain mixes them up. Nobody makes a speech about it. It's just how Hank is, and he still has best friends who stand next to him in the photo.

Something to be ready for. There's a classmate, Nick McKelty, who calls Hank names throughout and gets away with it. Hank gives as good as he gets, so it never feels grim, but it does run right through the book.

What to read next

If your reader wants to see where all this starts, the library has Bookmarks Are People Too. It's the first book in the series, and Hank's class is putting on a play he'd very much like the lead in, which means learning lines.