Red Sky in the Morning

Elizabeth Laird's Red Sky in the Morning is an honest, very funny, quietly heartbreaking story for 10 year olds about a girl whose baby brother arrives and is not what anyone expected.

What happens

Anna is twelve and she has been rehearsing this night for months. When her father rings for an ambulance she does not run. She puts on her dressing gown, finds her glasses, walks calmly down the hall and announces that everything is under control.

Nobody takes the slightest notice.

What she actually does for the next few hours is boil every saucepan in the kitchen, because that is what the eldest daughter always does in her grandmother's Victorian novels. She never does find out what the water is for. She steams up the entire ground floor.

That gap, between how grandly Anna thinks she is behaving and what is really happening around her, is where all the comedy lives. She is offended by an ambulanceman who laughs at her offer to give blood. She writes off her father as "an ignorant male". She is magnificent.

And then the doctor tells her she has a brother, and that he is not very well.

The scene that follows is the reason this book has lasted. Anna asks the questions a child would actually ask, not the polite ones. Will he be blind? Will he look funny and dribble? Will he be able to play and go to school and talk and laugh? The doctor will only promise her the laughing.

She admits, to us, that she cared about whether he would look funny more than anything else. Then she says that she knew with her brain that it was sad, but couldn't really feel it yet.

It's worth knowing what you're handing over. A disabled baby, a family crying in a bedroom at dawn, a father who crumples. Anna's honesty about her own awful first thoughts is the point of the book, but a sensitive reader may need to talk about it. There's a passing line where she says she couldn't imagine her parents having sex and found the idea disgusting, and Anna's world of acne and shifting friendships is squarely secondary school.

One practical thing. The edition here is the American one, so Anna says Mom. You'll want to know that before you read it aloud.

For a child with a sibling who needs more than their share of the grown-ups, or for one who is drawn to a narrator willing to say the unsayable, this is a good one.

What to read next

Laird does something similar in Secret Friends, where a girl invents a cruel nickname on her first day at a new school and then keeps the friendship that follows completely hidden.