The Tale of Angelino Brown

David Almond's The Tale of Angelino Brown is a warm, very funny story for 10 year olds about a grumpy bus driver who finds an angel in his shirt pocket.

What happens

Bert Brown has had enough. Twenty years of bus stops, traffic jams and passengers. And kids! Don't get Bert started on kids. Then one day there's a fluttering in his chest and he's sure it's a heart attack.

It isn't. It's a tiny angel in a little white dress, jumping about in his pocket among the pens and the timetables.

Bert takes him home to his wife Betty, who knows exactly what to do. She makes him egg, chips and beans. They call him Angelino and put him to bed in a cardboard box lined with cotton wool. By morning the grumpiest bus driver in town is grinning at the garden gate.

Betty is the cook at St Mungo's School, so of course Angelino goes to school. He lands in Class 5K with Nancy, Jack (who's convinced he's Lionel Messi) and clever Alice. There's a stern Acting Head Teacher, a professor obsessed with connectives, and a football match where Angelino turns out to be an amazing goalie. Oh, and he keeps getting bigger.

The whole thing reads like someone telling it to you out loud. "Here we go. All aboard." It's chatty and full of northern voices, all "mebbe" and "nowt" and "bloomin'", which makes it brilliant for reading together.

It's also rude in the way children love. Angelino farts. A LOT. Usually at the worst possible moment, including in church.

Under the jokes there's something softer. Every morning Betty lifts down a photo of a little boy from the wall of the spare bedroom and kisses it. Nobody explains it, and you feel it anyway.

And someone is watching. A young bloke in black, with a moustache and sunglasses, has seen what's in Bert's pocket. He keeps phoning his Boss about how much money a real angel might make...

If you've got a reader who loves a story that's daft and tender at the same time, this is a treat.

What to read next

For more of Almond's everyday magic, try Heaven Eyes. It's for older readers, with three children from a care home who sail off down the river one night and meet a very strange girl out on the mud.