Hi So Much

Laura Dockrill's Hi So Much is a funny, chatty story for 9 year olds about a girl who thinks out loud and cannot always stop herself.

What happens

Darcy is in trouble before the book has properly started.

She and her little sister Poppy noticed that their neighbour Cyril's name sounds like Cereal. Then they said so. To his face. Again and again, until he fell backwards into his own house and broke his arm.

Mum is L.I.V.I.D.

So there has to be a Get Well card. Darcy would quite like to draw a catapult on the front. Mum suggests ducks.

Darcy thinks ducks are boring and also thinks Cyril is being a bit dramatic, because the school caretaker once broke his back and you did not hear him going on about it.

She is not a cruel child. She just says the whole thought before she has worked out whether she should.

Reading it is like being talked at by the loudest girl in the class, at speed, with nothing left out. She tells you things you did not ask about, such as what lurgies actually look like (black slugs with sharp yellow teeth). She stops to check you noticed her clever bit. She does a dramatic scene from Little Women at her sister and is very pleased with herself.

The made-up words are half the fun. Broked. Ranned. Harderer. Card makerer. If your reader is the sort who gets cross at a word being wrong on purpose, warn them first. Everyone else will be saying harderer at you by teatime.

Underneath all the noise there is a proper worry. Darcy starts Big School in a week and she is one bajillion per cent scared about it. She does not want anything to change. In the car home she is thinking about ponds, and about Henrietta's fish that all ate each other.

That is the thing this book does really well. The joke and the worry sit right next to each other and she does not always know which one she is doing.

The hospital scene is where you feel it. Cyril cries when the girls hand over the card. Darcy thinks it is far too much fuss over one sunflower, and then works out that to Cyril, she and Poppy are geniuses, and she goes quiet about it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing that the family arrive all at once and nobody is introduced. Poppy, baby Hector, Mum, Dad and Lamb-Beth the pet lamb are just there from the first few pages. Your reader will have them sorted within a chapter.

What to read next

Sorry About Me is the obvious next one. It opens with her roaring at herself in the mirror, then announcing she is going vegetarian halfway through a plate of barbecue chicken wings.