I Am the Walrus

Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman's I Am the Walrus is a funny, twisty sci-fi mystery for 11 year olds about a boy whose body keeps doing things he didn't ask it to.

What happens

Noah Prime is fourteen and fed up. The motocross track in his tiny Oregon town has been flattened for condos, his bike's been stolen, and his dad makes designer coffins (Noah falls asleep in one and is late for school).

Then the odd things start. He somehow drops out of a tree onto a girl called Sahara, with no memory of climbing it. When three boys corner him in a stairwell, he doesn't punch anyone. His arms curl up like a T. rex's and he keels over on the spot, frozen stiff, like a possum playing dead.

He's always been weirdly hard to hurt, too. He was swept away in a river when he was six and turned up two miles UPSTREAM. He fell off a bluff at ten, and something dented a car roof on the way down.

The chapters are broken up by pieces of an interrogation. Noah is chained to a table while a very chilly agent grills him about all of it. So you know from the start that things get much bigger (the first line mentions a volcano, monsters and Stonehenge).

It's properly funny. Noah's best friend Ogden is either brilliantly right or spectacularly wrong about everything. He looks up "conversion disorder", wonders out loud about a brain tumour, and then decides it's probably Noah's monkey brain. Sahara runs her life in a straight line and can't stop thinking about the boy who fell on her, which annoys her enormously.

It's worth knowing it has a dark streak under the jokes. In one short scene a boy in Argentina, also called Noah, is tricked into a fake hospital scanner and reduced to ash. We also learn that boy once ate his sister's guinea pig without meaning to. People are clearly trying to kill our Noah too. It's all quick and matter-of-fact rather than gruesome, but a sensitive reader may find it a jolt.

If your reader likes a mystery they can piece together as they go, with lots of laughs and a hero who's rude to the people interrogating him, this is a great pick. Have you ever read a book where the main character is the mystery?

What to read next

For another fourteen-year-old hiding something very un-human, try Squirrel Meets World. Doreen Green has a squirrel tail tucked into her trousers and a new neighbourhood to explore.