My Big Fat Zombie Goldfish 01

Mo O'Hara's My Big Fat Zombie Goldfish is a gloriously silly story for 7 year olds about a boy who brings his brother's goldfish back from the dead with a battery.

What happens

Tom's older brother Mark has always been "mostly evil". Then he gets a chemistry set for his birthday and becomes a real-life EVIL SCIENTIST, white coat and everything.

His first experiment is a goldfish. He tips green gunk into its bowl to see what happens, and says he'll flush it afterwards. Tom can't let that happen. He scoops the fish out, drops it in the toilet (oops) and watches it go belly up.

Luckily his best friend Pradeep has seen hospital shows on TV. So they take the battery out of Tom's alarm clock and give the fish a zap. It works! They call him Frankie, after Frankenstein. But now Frankie's eyes glow green. He can hypnotise people. And he has a VERY big grudge against Mark.

It's told by Tom, and he's hilarious. He's got a colour code for emergencies (it's based on jelly beans), sixteen escape routes out of his house and a lot of opinions about big brothers. Have you got a younger sibling at home who'd agree with him?

Mark ties the boys up, and Pradeep's toddler sister ends up wedged in a bin, but it's all cartoon chaos. It whizzes along, with plenty of words in capitals and lots of daft jokes.

It's a brilliant pick for a reader who's just getting confident with chapter books and wants something that makes them laugh out loud.

And the story doesn't stop when Frankie's settled in, either. Pradeep's genius big brother Sanj comes home from school, and he's turned evil too.

A small note, since the book is American. You'll find "Mom" and a couple of American words, but nothing that gets in the way.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Frankie's back in The Sea-Quel. This time the boys are off to a lighthouse for the weekend, where a sign by the road says not to feed the eels. Especially the evil one!