The Trouble with Mummies

Fleur Hitchcock's The Trouble with Mummies is a funny and very peculiar mystery for 11 year olds, and it all begins when Sam's mum turns up after a hair appointment wearing a small Egyptian beard.

What happens

Sam's dad runs the city museum, which has just been done up. Then things at home start going badly wrong. Mum paints hieroglyphics over the flowery wallpaper. Supper is mostly cucumber. A pyramid appears where the back garden used to be. And nobody else in the family seems the least bit worried. (His big brother is just pleased nobody's told him to tidy his room for a week.)

It isn't only Sam's house either. His lovely teacher, Miss Primrose, starts gluing feathers onto a wetsuit to make an Aztec priest costume. The rugby club marches about chanting in Latin. The PE teacher throws a real javelin at the class. Even the policeman Sam goes to for help seems to have turned Roman.

Sam has two helpers. Ursula films everything and is rude to everyone. Henry is huge and kind and very easily hurt, and at first he's the only one who believes Sam. Sam spends a lot of time stuck in the middle of the two of them, which will feel very familiar to anyone with two friends who don't get on.

Sam tells the story himself, and he's a lovely worried narrator. He pictures himself as an orphan who has to make his own packed lunches. He's scared of the doctor because of a pencil rubber and his nose. And when Mum starts teaching him how to bury a pharaoh, he decides it's time to run away and live in a washing-machine box on the common.

It's the kind of book where you laugh and feel slightly uneasy at the same time. Why is everyone turning into someone from history? What's in the new museum cafe's chocolate? You'll want to know as much as Sam does.

There are a couple of creepier moments. Sam has a nightmare about an Aztec priest with a knife at the top of a bloody pyramid, and the reception class teddy is found with his heart cut out. It's all done with a wink, but an anxious reader might find those bits a bit much.

What to read next

Fleur Hitchcock also wrote The Thorn Island Adventure, where four cousins on holiday go hunting for a fisherman's missing boat because the police can't come till tomorrow.