Kick

Mitch Johnson's Kick is a football story for 10 year olds about a boy who stitches boots for the world's best players and dreams of wearing a pair himself.

What happens

Budi is almost twelve and lives in Jakarta with Mum, Dad and Grandma. Every day he sews football boots in a factory. The foreman walks up and down the rows with a cane, and anyone who's too slow feels it.

In his head, though, Budi is somewhere else entirely. He's the Indonesian wonder kid scoring last-minute winners for Real Madrid, even if the pitch is a dusty square and the goal is a rusty fence. His hero is Kieran Wakefield. He's quite sure anyone who supports Barcelona has a lot of problems.

That's what makes it such a joy to read. Budi is cheerful and SO sure of himself. He does action replays of his goals round the dinner table. He tells Mum a tiger swam all the way from Sumatra to bite his knee. There's even a list of 11 reasons why his favourite player is better than Lazaro Celestino (number 11 is that he wears the number 11 shirt).

Then you start to notice what he doesn't say out loud. On Wednesdays the family only have rice. On Fridays they don't have anything. Dad's wages are late again. Budi has a condition that stops his blood clotting, and he worries about bleeding on the inside.

Over all of it hangs the Dragon, the local landlord and moneylender. Everyone round there owes him something. Then a single bad kick leaves Budi in his debt, and suddenly a lot more than his football dreams is at stake.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Budi's world is a hard one. Children work long shifts and get hit with a cane. Budi has nightmares about his uncle being taken to Execution Island to be shot, and he mentions quite casually that the Dragon once killed his own brother. It's all in the opening chapters.

A child who finds cruelty to children upsetting might find that hard going. If you've got a football-mad reader who's ready for a story with real weight behind the jokes, this is a brilliant one (and it might make them look at their own boots a bit differently).

What to read next

If they want another boy with a ball at his feet and danger all around him, try Morris Gleitzman's Boy Overboard. Jamal plays in the desert between piles of rubble, and his sister Bibi isn't allowed to play at all.