The Fourteenth Goldfish

The Fourteenth Goldfish by Jennifer L. Holm is a funny, quietly thoughtful story for 8 year olds about a grandfather who turns up looking thirteen.

What happens

Ellie is eleven and she does not like change. Her best friend Brianna found volleyball and stopped coming round. The handprints they painted on Ellie's bedroom wall every year since first grade have no new one on them.

She also had a goldfish called Goldie who lasted seven whole years, which is a miracle, until her mum admits it was never the same fish. There have been thirteen. Ellie gets a toilet-bowl funeral and asks for a dog instead.

Then the babysitter mentions, almost in passing, that Ellie's mum is late because she is collecting Ellie's grandfather from the police.

What comes through the front door that night is a boy in a rumpled pinstripe shirt, a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows and black dress socks, telling Ellie's mum to put the bins out and asking when she last fertilised the lawn.

He wants to know if Ellie made honor roll. He suggests her mother buy a pant-suit. He points out that a PhD lasts a lot longer than love.

It is a brilliant way to do it. You work out who he is a couple of pages before Ellie lets herself believe it, and the joke keeps running because he is thirteen on the outside and extremely old on the inside.

Ellie is lovely company. Her voice is flat and dry and she notices things. She likes jigsaw puzzles, one thousand pieces of New York taxis, because she likes working out how a curve meets a curve. Her parents are theatre people who keep telling her to find her passion, and she is fairly sure she was born into the wrong family.

One bit to know about. In the first chapter the babysitter chats away about a neighbour with Alzheimer's who kept wandering off and was eventually hit by a car. It is offhand and Ellie is quite shaken by it. If your child has a grandparent they are worried about, that page may land harder than the author intended.

Otherwise the harder things here are gently done. Getting older. Friends who drift. A parent and a grandparent who do not get on.

Some of it is American, so there is honor roll and the mall and middle school, but nothing tricky.

What to read next

Same author, different planet. The Lion of Mars has an eleven year old who has never set foot on Earth and is starting to wonder why the grown-ups will not talk about the other colonies.