The Boy Who Ran Away From the Circus

A. F. Harrold's The Boy Who Ran Away From the Circus is a very silly story for 9 year olds about a circus boy who has never once been inside a library.

What happens

Fizzlebert Stump (Fizz to everyone) has unruly red hair and an old coat the Ringmaster grew out of. His mum is a clown. His dad is the strongman. Every night Fizz puts his head between a lion's jaws and the crowd goes wild.

So what's the problem? There are no other children in the whole circus. His best friend is a sea lion called Fish, who can't play cards and burps tuna in his face.

One night some local kids come to tell him how brave he is. For about a minute Fizz thinks he's made real friends. Then they hear his name...

It's a small, sad moment and it's handled so kindly. Fizz goes to bed feeling crushed, and plenty of children will know exactly how that feels.

The kids leave a library book behind. Fizz doesn't even know what a library is (how would he, when the circus never stays anywhere long?). So off he goes to hand it back, and inside he finds shelves and shelves of books you can take home for nothing! If only his parents would come and fill in the form.

That's when a helpful little old couple step up to offer a hand. Hmm.

The real joy here is the narrator. He chats to your reader the whole way through, in brackets (and sometimes brackets inside brackets). He stops to explain the cancan, or to warn you off lions' mouths. The chapter titles tell you what's coming, like the one where a lion eats a child's head. (Don't panic. The lion's teeth are rubber. He lost his real ones to the lion tamer's after-dinner sweets.)

The circus crowd is great fun too. There's a mind reader in pink rabbit slippers who once set fire to Fizz's history book, and a fortune teller who teaches French while knowing about six words of it.

If you've got a reader who likes a book that talks back to them, and who likes their jokes daft, this will go down a treat. It's a lovely nudge towards what a library card can do as well.

What to read next

A. F. Harrold brings the same chatty, bracket-happy silliness to Greta Zargo. Greta lives on her own (her aunt is just over the road), reports for the local paper and has no idea that something wobbly and jelly-like is climbing out of a hole at the end of her garden.