Tall Story

Candy Gourlay's Tall Story is a book for 10 year olds told by two people at once, and they want completely different things.

What happens

Andi is the shortest and youngest player on her school basketball team and has just been made point guard. She is in Year Eight. She runs home through the London drizzle to tell her mum and does a pirouette on the landing outside the flat.

Bernardo is her half-brother. He is sixteen, he lives in a mountain village in the Philippines, and he has been waiting years for a letter from the Home Office saying he can come to London and be with his family.

The letter finally comes. Andi is beside herself. She has one hope about him, which is that he will be tall enough for basketball.

He is eight feet tall.

What makes the book work is that you get Bernardo's side before that lands. He was the smallest boy in his class at thirteen, watching everyone else shoot up. Then he grew two inches in a month, four in two months, and lay awake listening to his own bones creak.

His mother wanted a specialist. A city doctor waved her away and told her the youth of today were bound to be taller than their parents. Then the village decided Bernardo was the returned spirit of a giant from an old story, and that his growing was why the earthquakes had stopped. People came. They brought gifts. Nobody took him back to a doctor.

So he steps off the plane already carrying the thing that nobody in his life has been willing to name.

Andi is very funny about all of it, in the way a person is funny when she is quietly furious. Her mum has no volume control. The estate agent is oily. The flat is a shoebox and the kitchen is also the hall cupboard.

And her own news gets swallowed whole. On the same afternoon she makes point guard, her mum announces that they are moving house in a fortnight and she is starting at a new school. She never gets to say it out loud.

A word about who this suits. Bernardo is a teenager and his chapters sound like one. There is nothing unsuitable in it, but a younger child will get more out of it with someone to talk to about it.

The legend chapters are the quiet treasure. A giant loathed for being different who decides to win people over instead, and ploughs their fields in the night by dragging his comb through the soil.

What to read next

For another newcomer seen through a child's eyes, The Boy at the Back of the Class is in the library too. A nine year old narrator finds a silent new boy called Ahmet in the empty chair behind her and sets out, with three friends, to work out what has happened to him.