Starboard

Nicola Skinner's Starboard is a wildly funny adventure for 10 year olds about a famous girl, a school trip and a very old ship with ideas of her own.

What happens

Kirsten Bramble is eleven and has been on the telly since she was seven and a half. It started when she filmed a video to find her dad a girlfriend and it went viral. That turned into a hit reality show. Then spin-offs, Christmas specials and a Christmas single.

But things aren't going so well now. The show has been dropped. The money's running out. Dad's girlfriend Edwina has confiscated his salted peanuts. And Kirsten has no real friends at school. When one series was about her being lonely, the producers found her a best friend at an audition (she was very good at learning lines).

Then her class goes on a trip to the SS Great Britain in Bristol, and Kirsten falls in love. She trips onto the deck and ends up with splinters in both palms. She finds a grubby captain's hat at the bottom of the dressing-up basket. She wanders into a cabin where an old map reads HER, and it isn't impressed.

Then she puts her hands on the ship's wheel. And the museum ship, which hasn't touched water for fifty years, smashes out of her dock and into the harbour. With Kirsten on board. And Olive, the ex-best friend she'd rather avoid.

This is SUCH a fun read. The narrator keeps popping in with cheeky asides, like telling you not to stare at a full stop in case it gets embarrassed. Dad explains everything with maths (the two of them are two triangles making a square). There's a funny little man in a tall black hat who smells of cigars and seems to know the ship very well indeed.

Underneath all the jokes, though, there's a lonely girl who's been pretending she's fine for a long time. One line says she was only eleven but sometimes felt much, much older. Kirsten can be vain and a bit of a show-off. But you can see exactly why, and you really want her to be all right.

If you've got a reader who loves big laughs with a lot of heart underneath, or who's ever felt left out while everyone else seemed to have a gang, this is a brilliant pick.

What to read next

For more of the same mischief, try Nicola Skinner's Giant. Minnie Wadlow lives on an island where children are paired with giants of their own, and hers is the shortest one in Quake Quarter.