The ACB with Honora Lee

Kate De Goldi's The ACB with Honora Lee is a quiet, funny, slightly odd book for 10 year olds about a girl who makes an alphabet book out of the people in her grandmother's rest home.

What happens

Perry is nine, wears thick spectacles, and has a week so full of after-school activities that it's a wonder she has time to breathe. Piano on Monday. Tutoring on Tuesday. Clarinet on Wednesday. Music and Movement on Thursday, which she is terrible at.

Her parents believe only children must be kept busy. Perry would rather have a dog.

Then the Thursday class gets cancelled and she suggests something nobody expects. She'll go and visit Gran instead. On her own.

Gran is Honora Lee. She is seventy-six, she lives at a place called Santa Lucia, and her memory has gone. She calls Perry's father by the names of her dead brothers. She asks Perry who she is, over and over, and decides she's a boy. She plays I Spy entirely wrong, on purpose, so she can win.

What happens next is really lovely. Perry notices Gran likes the alphabet. So she starts a book. A is for Audrey. D is for Drama Queen. Q is for Quiet.

The letters come out in no order at all, because Gran does them in no order at all, and every one of them is really a portrait of somebody at Santa Lucia.

This is not a book that rushes. It's made of small scenes and very good dialogue, and the jokes come from people saying exactly what they think. Gran is rude and quick and completely undefeated. Perry corrects everyone, including her mother, and is corrected right back.

If your child likes noticing people, they will love this. Perry is a noticer. She draws everybody. She collects dead bumblebees in a yogurt pot, which her mother thinks is macabre and she thinks is interesting.

The book does not soften the rest home, and you should know that going in. Residents wander into each other's rooms. One woman grabs Perry's wrist and pinches her hard enough to bruise. A man catches Gran stealing his peppermints, shouts "Thief!", and hits her across the leg with his walking stick, and a nurse has to write it up in the incident book. Perry's own father keeps his visits to forty minutes and jokes about his mother being a handful.

It's all told calmly, from a nine-year-old's eye level, and that is exactly why it works. But if you've been somewhere like Santa Lucia with your own family recently, read it first.

What to read next

For a completely different take on a grandparent whose memory has gone, try Grandpa's Great Escape. Grandpa was a wartime pilot, he has Alzheimer's, and his grandson's answer is to stop correcting him and simply climb into the cockpit with him.