Some Sunny Day

Adam Baron's Some Sunny Day is a funny lockdown story for 10 year olds about a boy whose mum accidentally gives away his most treasured football shirt.

What happens

Cymbeline Igloo (yes, that's his real name) is stuck at home with his mum. His best friends are two metres and a juddery Zoom call away. There's no football on the telly. There aren't even any pancakes, because the shops have run out of flour.

Mum is coping the only way she knows how. She cleans. Then she has a Clear Out. Then she clears out Cym's clothes drawer.

That's the problem. Folded in with his old clothes was his signed Charlton shirt, with every player's autograph and IGLOO printed on the back. It went out on the pavement in a box of old stuff for anyone to take.

The next morning, at quarter past five, Mum drags him out to an empty park. The river is hidden under a long white snake of mist. Cym finally manages his teacher's impossible kick-up challenge, with nobody there to see it. And down by the water there's a kid in a Charlton shirt with his name on the back.

Then the mist closes in and the kid is gone.

Cym tells it all himself, in CAPITALS whenever he feels strongly (which is a lot). He barricades his bedroom against the Yellow-Handed Clear-Out Fiend. He stomps round his room and counts every stomp. It's very funny and very real, and anyone who lived through lockdown will recognise the Zoom calls that go nowhere and the morning workouts on the telly.

Under the jokes it's quite tender. Cym hears Mum crying on the phone to Stephan, her fiancé, who's stuck in New Zealand with his daughters. And he stops being cross and goes and hugs her instead. That moment will stay with a lot of readers.

The book doesn't pretend lockdown was easy. There's worry and loneliness and a grown-up who isn't coping. For most readers that will make it feel honest rather than heavy. Then there's a school project on the Home Front, and a plan to visit Mrs Stebbings, the dinner lady who loves Charlton even more than Cym does and makes the world's stickiest sticky toffee pudding.

What to read next

If your reader gets attached to Cym (it's hard not to), You Won’t Believe This is another Cymbeline Igloo mystery, this time about someone doing terrible things to his favourite teacher.