Here’s Hank – You Can’t Drink a Meatball Through a Straw

You Can't Drink a Meatball Through a Straw by Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver is a cooking contest story for 6 year olds with a hero who says exactly what he thinks.

What happens

It's Friday pizza night at Hank Zipzer's flat. Then the door opens and in comes Judith Ann, a cousin he'd completely forgotten was coming, wearing a chef's hat.

She won't touch the pizza. She only eats pizza she makes herself, with goat cheese and artichokes.

She's here for the Junior Chef Cook-Off, and she would very much like everyone to know she's going to win it.

Hank calls her Judy. She hates that. She calls him Henry. He refuses to answer.

By bedtime he's lost the hockey game he wanted to go to, lost his own bed and been made her vegetable washer. He's also got a whole evening of watching someone else roll meatless meatballs.

Then a contestant drops out of the competition and Hank is handed a kitchen station of his own, with a cutting board of artichokes and crab legs on it. He has never seen an artichoke in his life.

What he does have is his packed lunch and a blender.

Hank tells all this himself, and he's very funny company. He does an eggplant voice (he'd never tried one before and reckons it went rather well). He explains that his mind wanders off without asking permission. He greets the head of a cooking school as Ms Smelly because he can't quite read her badge.

That last bit isn't a throwaway joke. Hank finds reading hard, and the book is honest about how that feels from the inside. When he's handed the contest safety rules, the words go swimming about on the page like fish.

The best scene isn't the cook-off at all. It's the one where Hank walks into his own kitchen and finds his perfect, infuriating cousin sitting on the floor in tears, admitting that cooking is the only thing she's good at because school is a nightmare for her too.

He sits down next to her. That's it. No speech, no lesson, just two kids who have both been told to try harder.

If you've got a child who has ever been compared to a cousin who does everything right, this one will land. And it's kind about it, which is the nice surprise.

Plenty of daft jokes too, mostly about food and iguana sick.

What to read next

If Hank's company goes down well, How to Hug an Elephant is in the library. The class goes to the zoo, Hank gets stuck with the same big-mouthed classmate as his partner, and he can't tell his left from his right at the best of times.