The Mega-Complicated Crushes of Lottie Brooks

Katie Kirby's The Mega-Complicated Crushes of Lottie Brooks is a funny diary story for 10 year olds about first dates, first kisses and an awful lot of overthinking.

What happens

Lottie has a date. An ACTUAL date, with Daniel, at the ice cream place at three o'clock on Saturday.

So she's got one week to work out what happens if he tries to kiss her. Her research so far is a Google search with 2.8 billion results and some advice about letting her lips guide the way. (Not much use when your lips have no idea where they're going.)

The other problem is telling her parents. Dad will go overprotective. Mum will go gushy. Her brother Toby will find it hilarious for the rest of her natural life.

You're reading her actual diary, so you get every wobble as it happens. One entry she's rating cheese paninis thirteen out of ten. The next she feels sick with nerves about a boy she can barely speak to in the lunch queue.

She writes out whole conversations word for word, including the bit where she says "plud ouu" instead of an actual sentence. Then she gives herself an award for managing real English words. She's very funny about her own disasters.

There's friendship stuff running underneath all of it. Her oldest mate Molly has a boyfriend now and the pair of them giggle away in a world of their own. Lottie's pleased for her and a bit sad at the same time, which is a very real way to feel.

If you've got a reader who narrates their entire day back to you with sound effects, they'll recognise Lottie. Tiny things are enormous. A snidey comment at lunch is a proper event.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing that this is a book about crushes and it's honest about them. Lottie frets about her first kiss for pages. Her friends compare celebrity crushes, she gets money out of her dad by mumbling something about "women's things", and there's a summer trip abroad later where she meets a boy who barely speaks English.

If your reader isn't interested in boyfriends yet, a lot of that will sail past them or feel a bit old. If they're already whispering about who fancies who, it lands just right.

What to read next

If they want more of her before this one, The Catastrophic Friendship Fails of Lottie Brooks is in the library too. That's the term where Molly comes home from Australia and the Daniel crush is still a secret Lottie is busy pretending she doesn't have.