Here’s Hank – The Soggy, Foggy Campout

Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver's The Soggy, Foggy Campout is a Here's Hank story for 6 year olds about a boy who has to write a poem and cannot find a single rhyme.

What happens

Hank Zipzer is stuck. His class has to write a poem about nature for the We Love Nature assembly on Monday. His best friends Frankie and Ashley wrote theirs straight away. Hank has spent an evening staring at a blank piece of paper with nothing in his head.

His mum has an idea. Real nature. A campsite a few hours north of the city, one night in a tent, the whole family.

Hank's dad is a city man who needs pavement under his feet. He would much rather everyone went to the cinema.

They go anyway. The dog eats a whole bag of pickles in the back of the car. The first tree they pick has a nest of yellow jackets in it (American wasps, and yes, they sting). Then the sky goes dark.

What's lovely about these books is how plainly Hank tells you he's bad at school. He gets it out of the way early on, no fuss. He's bad at reading, spelling, maths and science. He's great at lunch. If you've got a child who has already decided they're rubbish at something, Hank's flat honesty about it is very easy company.

And he's funny with it. His rhymes are dreadful on purpose. Purple and gurple. Yellow jacket and jello shacket. He knows exactly how bad they are.

The storm is where the book turns. The tent goes, properly goes, lifted off the platform like a balloon while the family sit in the rain and watch it roll away down the hill. Hank is the one who crawls off into the mud and the fog to get it back.

A thought before bedtime, if your reader is a worrier. The family end up out in the open in a night storm, a branch snaps off in the wind and lands next to Hank, and there's a stretch where he can't find his mum and starts to panic. It's short and the fright is the friendly sort rather than the nasty sort. A child who enjoys a bit of jeopardy will love it. A child who is currently frightened of the dark might want this one in daylight.

What to read next

Cheerio's own book is here too. A Short Tale About a Long Dog is how the Zipzers ended up with a pickle-breathed puppy in the first place, and Hank has to get his grades up in every single subject before his dad will so much as drive to the animal shelter.