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Will McIntosh's The Classmate is a creepy science-fiction story for 10 year olds about a secret boarding school with one very strange pupil.
Benjamin gets two days' notice. His mum works for the CIA (he's quick to tell you she does data analysis and is a total dork, not a spy). She's signed him up for a special school for the country's best and brightest, and he isn't allowed a say.
The bus drives through enormous security gates. Behind the fence there's an ice cream parlour, an arcade and a roller coaster. No phones allowed. And everyone has to wear a tiny earpiece, day and night, and do exactly what the voice in it says.
Then they're warned about a special classmate they "might find frightening to look at". Her name is Eve. She wears a purple dress and a bow. And when she's scared, her lumpy blue skin flexes into sharp barbs and she hisses like a punctured tyre.
Benjamin's seat is right next to hers.
He's a brilliant narrator for this. He has an anxiety disorder and explains it really well (his psychologist says his anxiety volume button is broken). So he's nervous about everything already, and THEN this happens! He's very honest, and a lot of the humour comes from that.
His new friends are great too. Lorena is chatty, eats three breakfasts and reckons Eve is something supernatural. Persephone is sure they're all part of some government experiment. Who's right? And why do the prizes at the school party look so very rigged?
It's creepy rather than gory. The fear comes from not knowing what Eve is, and from the voices listening in on every conversation. Mind you, the night Eve moves into their dormitory might be one to read in daylight if your reader gets jumpy at bedtime!
If your reader wants another boy telling his own story, with aliens in it and a lot less creeping dread, The Jamie Drake Equation is in the library too. Jamie's dad is an astronaut on the International Space Station, and the girl who sits next to him in class is convinced aliens are real because she's seen them on YouTube.
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