Now

Morris Gleitzman's Now is a story for 11 year olds about a girl trying to live up to the dead six year old she was named after.

What happens

Zelda is new in town and living with her grandfather Felix, because her parents are doctors working in Darfur. There's also Jumble, who is the best dog in the world, even though his legs look like they're on back to front.

She's spent all her savings on Felix's birthday present. It's the one Richmal Crompton title he hasn't got. He's been collecting the William books since he was a boy, because he reckons they helped save his life.

On the way back from the post office, three older girls stop her on the footpath.

The rest of that afternoon is horrible. More on that in a moment. What carries the book is Zelda's voice. She's funny and she talks to you non-stop and she is trying extremely hard to be brave. She measures herself against the first Zelda, Felix's best friend, who was killed by the Nazis when she was six. She finds herself coming up short every time.

Felix is wonderful. He doesn't want to be called grandad, because as a child hiding from Nazi soldiers he had to use a false name, so now he likes his own one used. He wears soft jumpers in an Australian summer because he was cold so much when he was young. He can't stand up very steadily because he spent two years hidden in a hole in the ground.

None of that is spelled out at length. It just sits there, next to a birthday cake he's iced himself and a dog barking along to happy birthday.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The bullying is nasty and very specific. The girls take a locket off Zelda's neck and push it down the throat of a dead mouse, and a boy from her class has to cut the mouse open with her school scissors so she can get it back. A text message arrives afterwards telling her that her parents ditched her. Behind all of it sits the Holocaust, not as a history lesson but as the thing that happened to the kind old man doing the icing. If your reader finds cruelty to animals hard, or bullying that passing adults don't even look at, this is a rough start. If they're ready, what they get is one of the warmest books you'll find on a very hard subject, and the warmth is mostly Felix.

What to read next

One more thing. This comes late in a sequence, and it opens with Felix's childhood already behind him. If your reader wants that childhood, the book called Once starts it, with Felix in a Polish orphanage in 1942, a whole carrot in his soup and no real idea what is going on outside.