My Granny’s Great Escape

My Granny's Great Escape by Jeremy Strong is a daft, gossipy comedy for 8 year olds, narrated by a boy whose granny has developed a serious crush on the leather-clad biker next door.

What happens

Nicholas is nine and mortified. Granny is sixty-two, which he reckons is roughly five thousand, and she keeps asking him whether the man next door fancies her.

He would like to crawl into a hole. He'd quite like Granny to crawl into one too.

Next door lives Mr Tugg, who Dad calls The Martian. Mr Tugg keeps an actual list of complaints about this family. The lawn. The car. Dad's karaoke machine. The unfinished Tyrannosaurus slide in the garden.

(He trims his own grass with nail scissors. That is the sort of neighbour he is.)

Then Mr Tugg's father moves in. Lancelot is sixty-five with a grey ponytail, leather trousers and a motorbike and sidecar. He has also brought twenty racing pigeons and installed them in his son's immaculate attic.

You can see where this is going.

The running joke that will stick is Nicholas's scoring system for Mr Tugg's explosions. One star is going red and refusing to speak. Five stars is white, shaking, arms pumping, too furious to get any words out at all. Your reader will start rating people by teatime.

What carries it is Nicholas's voice. He tells you everything like gossip, with brackets and asides all over the place, and he is completely honest about how embarrassing his family are.

He's a fair reporter too. When Granny gives him the story of her first ride on the bike, he points out that he wasn't there and she may well have improved it.

She still takes it round the duck pond on one wheel. With the sidecar on. Pursued by two park keepers on a mowing tractor.

The part that isn't played for laughs is Dad. He tells Granny she's too old to be messing about on motorbikes, and she is not having that for a second. If your child has ever been told they're too small to do something they know perfectly well they can do, they'll be on Granny's side straight away.

What to read next

There is more of this family in My Dad's Got an Alligator, which comes earlier. Nicholas refers back to it here, so you can see roughly where it sits. In that one the alligator is still living in the house, Dad is insisting it's a vegetarian, and Mum has gone upstairs and locked the bedroom door.