Scram!

Lauren Child's Scram is a hot, happy summer story for 8 year olds about a girl who's bored out of her brain until a stray dog picks her to follow home.

What happens

It's the first week of the holidays and Clarice Bean has absolutely nothing to do. Her best friend Betty Moody is away all summer. It's too hot to sit in the airing cupboard with a torch. And her big sister Marcie has pinched the batteries out of that torch again anyway.

Clarice moans so much that Mum finally tells her to scram.

What follows is one of those days where everything goes wrong at once. A football through the fence into grumpy Mrs Stampney's birdbath. A borrowed pair of flip-flops. Five tins of very odd spaghetti that nobody wants to eat (she bought them for the free dog tag offer on the label, obviously).

And outside the corner shop, a small grey dog who looks at her without blinking. Every time she turns round, there he is again.

Then Mum and Dad dash off to a wedding they'd both forgotten about, leaving Grandad in charge until Monday. Grandad has a canary called Chirp who flies around his room. So a dog in the house is NOT going to be popular.

Clarice's answer? Hide him. In the shed, in her bedroom cupboard, under Marcie's bed...

If your reader hasn't met Clarice Bean yet, they're in for a treat. She talks exactly the way kids think, all in a rush, with words like "unedible" and "worser" and days that feel "nothingy". Her logic is completely watertight to her and slightly bonkers to everyone else.

The family is chaos in the best way. There's a little brother who thinks a white cardigan on a dog is a ghost, a sister who's hopping mad about her make-up bag, and a grandad who only has one voice and it's always sensible.

Anyone with brothers and sisters will recognise the arguments about whose fault things are. It's hard not to take Clarice's side (even when it definitely was her).

What to read next

She's also a huge fan of a girl secret agent from her favourite books, and keeps asking herself what that girl would do. If that makes your reader curious, Lauren Child wrote those books too. Try Ruby Redfort: Look Into My Eyes, where Ruby is on a stool by the bathroom window with binoculars, taking notes on a cake van that's been parked outside far too long.