The Tin Snail

Cameron McAllister's The Tin Snail is a workshop story for 10 year olds set in France in the last winter before the war, where a boy's idea has to save his father's job.

What happens

Angelo's father designs cars. He used to be famous for it. Three years on, the money has run out, the men who paid for everything are muttering in corners, and he sits in a cafe loading nine spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee, waiting for an idea.

Angelo is sent out for a pastry to get him out of the way. The baker's ovens weren't switched on, so every pastry in the shop has come out flat.

He buys the flattest one anyway and runs it back like treasure. Because a pastry that has risen at one end and sunk at the other isn't a ruined pastry. It's a shape nobody has ever put on a car.

His father takes out his penknife, turns it to the light, and calls his son a genius.

What happens next you can see coming, and it's still awful. The new car goes to the Paris Motor Show. Angelo, told to go to school and then rescued at the last minute by his dad on a motorbike, climbs into the driver's seat to show off the suspension, and sets off a chain of events that ends with the car under another car, flat as a pancake.

Much of this book is a boy trying to be useful and getting it spectacularly wrong. If you've got a child who has ever tried to fix something and made it much worse, they'll recognise the feeling in their stomach.

It's also very funny. A brakeless ride to the village on a stolen lawn mower, through a stream, with his father steering blind because mud has covered his goggles, is one of the best things in it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Angelo's parents are coming apart, and it happens on the page rather than off it. There are rows through the wall, a plate crashing, his mother reminding his father whose money pays the school fees, and a conversation in a cafe where Angelo asks outright if they are splitting up and gets told they are "taking a break". He blames himself for all of it.

The other shadow is the obvious one. It's 1938, the German stand at the show is the busiest in the hall, and Angelo's father spits the word Nazis at the men escorting a rival engineer through the crowd. Nothing violent happens here, but the war is coming and the book assumes your reader knows it.

What to read next

For another boy who is happiest in a workshop with his dad, hand them Danny the Champion of the World. Danny lives in a caravan behind a filling station, he can strip an engine before he's nine, and the two of them are a complete world until he finds out what his father has been doing at night.