The Third Mushroom

Jennifer L. Holm's The Third Mushroom is a funny, tender story for 9 year olds about a girl whose grandfather is back, and still looks like a teenager.

What happens

Ellie comes home from school to a smashed back door and a half-eaten box of burritos. She's on the phone to the emergency services when the toilet flushes. Out walks a boy with a ponytail, loafers and black socks, asking for the plunger. It's Grandpa Melvin.

Melvin is seventy-seven, a scientist with two PhDs, and he's found a way to make himself young again. He's been travelling for a year and he's come home with a mountain of dirty laundry. He's also a bossy, starving, very grumpy thirteen-ish boy who has to go back to school as Ellie's "cousin". (He's furious they've made him repeat eighth grade.)

So Ellie has an idea. They'll enter the science fair for the whole county together. Their experiment involves a mysterious frozen creature from the Philippines with six legs, a lot of fruit flies and a banana mush that Ellie admits tastes a bit like pudding.

It's laugh-out-loud funny. Melvin blames everything on "the Puberty" and takes the dishwasher apart because he has two PhDs and can surely fix it. Melvin and Ellie's theatre-teacher mum bicker like a pair of teenagers. It's a family full of big personalities, and they're lovely company.

But it's also very gentle about big things. Melvin's blog is full of flower photos with little notes, and one of them just says "I see you everywhere". Ellie has a best friend, Raj, who she might be starting to like a bit more than that. And the family cat has a rough patch later on, which is worth knowing for a pet-lover.

If your reader is into science, this is a treat. Melvin talks about penicillin, the Herschels and why drawing makes you notice things, and none of it feels like a lesson.

What to read next

If they haven't met Melvin yet, The Fourteenth Goldfish is where he first turns up on Ellie's doorstep looking about thirteen and telling her mum to put the bins out.