The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot

The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot by Margaret McNamara is a space version of a story most 5 year olds already know off by heart.

What happens

Bork, Gork and Nklxwcyz grow up in an old-fashioned house in a snug little crater. The house gets too crowded. So their mama hugs them all goodbye and sends them off to find planets of their own.

She gives them one warning before they go. Watch out for the Big Bad Robot. It wants to chew you up.

Bork zooms off first. She picks a dusty planet with a shiny space rover whizzing round it and decides she'd like to live in that. Gork spots a giant planet with golden rings, hitches a lift on a satellite and surfs one of the rings. Neither of them listens to their brother telling them to stick together.

So Nklxwcyz travels on by himself, right out to a massive blue planet with thirteen moons. He gathers stardust for light and solar panels for warmth. He builds sturdy walls rock by rock, and he sticks a tall shiny telescope on top for a chimney.

His house isn't zippy or cool. It's just very safe, and there's room in it for three.

Then one galactic dawn there's a rumbling in the universe.

The joy of this one is reading it out loud. The Robot doesn't huff and puff. It cracks and smacks and whacks, and it bleeps and meeps and groinks and queeks its way from planet to planet. When it finally reaches that last door, what it gets back is "Not by the slime on my chinny chin chin!"

Your reader will know exactly where they are, and they'll still want to know how it ends.

Do practise Nklxwcyz before bedtime though. Nobody in the book can pronounce it either, which is half the fun (the aliens just call him by it anyway).

It isn't gentle, mind. Two houses get smashed to pieces and the Robot keeps threatening to eat somebody. For most children that's the good bit, because they've met a wolf doing the same job. If your 5 year old finds chases genuinely frightening, this one is loud.

What to read next

If they enjoy a story they know being given a good shake, Beauty & the Pea puts two of them in a blender at once. A lonely beast, a pea under a mattress and a princess who likes flowers, all in rhyme.