The Lotterys More or Less

Emma Donoghue's The Lotterys More or Less is a big, noisy family story for 9 year olds about the week before Christmas going completely off plan.

What happens

There are twelve people in the Lottery house. Four parents, seven children, a grandfather who has just moved in, and a rescued parrot called Opal with a wing that doesn't work. The house is in Toronto and they call it Camelottery.

Sumac is nine and she is the one who keeps the traditions. Pow Wow, Holi, Carnival, Hogmanay. If a celebration is coming, Sumac has it written on a calendar in felt tip with the Nutcracker drawn on it.

This year everything is wrong. One of her dads is in Delhi with her eldest brother. The snow won't arrive. A Brazilian couchsurfer is asleep in the basement and eating all the bananas. And Grumps is still settling in, which is its own weather system.

Grumps says things like "Guests, like fish, stink on the third day". His memory comes and goes. Sumac has learned not to contradict him when it goes, and is quietly delighted when it doesn't.

The pleasure of this one is the sheer traffic. Somebody is always rollerblading through the kitchen or wanting a slice of the melon that's standing in for the sun in a science lesson. Four-year-old Brian wears polar bear earmuffs day and night and says she can hear you, she's just not listening. Aspen has ridden through parrot poo on purpose, to test the consistency, except she says constancy and gets corrected.

Sumac is a pedant and knows it. Her family tell her so, nicely. If your reader is the sort of child who looks things up mid-argument and comes back with the figure, they've met their match.

It's a warm book about a very particular family, and it doesn't stop to explain them. Two mums, two dads, some children born into it and some adopted, a four-year-old who announced she wasn't a girl and changed her name, and a toddler doing physiotherapy because somebody shook him when he was a baby, which is stated once, plainly, and left there.

Nothing in it is frightening. The sadness, where there is any, is the ordinary kind. A grandfather who mislays his own son. A child who just wants everybody home in one house for a week and can't say so without sounding ungrateful.

Fair warning that you will lose track of who's who at the start. Everyone does. Then it clicks and you're in.

What to read next

If they like a houseful, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street has four sisters, one father, an aunt who has decided he ought to start dating, and a plan the girls hatch to stop her.