Read The Smidgens free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
David O'Connell's The Smidgens is a funny, spooky adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who's only a few inches tall and fed up with being the only Smidgen her age.
Gafferty Sprout lives with her mum, her dad and two little brothers in a huge old house carved into the rock under a chocolate factory. Once it was packed with Smidgen families. Now it's just the five of them and hundreds of empty rooms.
Getting food means sneaking into the human world. The book opens with Gafferty and her brother Gobkin, disguised as a spider and a fly, stealing ONE chip from the fryer at McGreasy's Burgers. (A single chip feeds the whole family, with leftovers!) It's a brilliantly tense scene, full of giant fingers and spitting fat.
On the way home something icy and invisible chases Gafferty into the forbidden tunnels. There she finds a tiny old atlas of the Tangle, the maze of tunnels under the town. It hints that there were once three Smidgen clans. If one of them was hers, could the other two still be out there?
Meanwhile a glamorous cat burglar called Claudia Slymark has arrived in town. She wears three ghosts in little bottles on her necklace, someone has hired her to find the Smidgens, and she's already spotted two of them.
It's a great mix of cosy and creepy. The Sprouts have a bottle-top sink, a matchbox dresser and a washing-sponge mattress. Then the ghosts slide out of their bottles and the tunnels go cold. The chase in the dark is quite tense, but the ghosts are more fun than nightmare (one of them thinks cockroach sandwiches are very tasty if you remember the ketchup).
Gafferty is great. She's brave, bossy with her little brother and cross with her parents for keeping everyone hidden away. More than anything she wants friends her own age, and plenty of children will know exactly how that feels.
If your reader loves the idea of tiny people living secretly right under our noses, they'll want Edie and the Box of Flits next, where a girl finds a family of tiny winged people hiding in a box someone left on the Tube.
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
7-day free trial. Then £7.99/month.
