The Unspeakable Unknown

Eliot Sappingfield's The Unspeakable Unknown is a very silly science-fiction adventure for 9 year olds, set in a school where exploding snowmen are just part of Tuesday.

What happens

Nikola Kross goes to the School. It sits under a force field and it's for parahumans (aliens who look human) and kids who are much too clever for normal schools. Somebody has hacked the weather, so it's snowing without permission. The principal has sent an email banning anyone from enjoying it.

Then an Old One attacks a chemistry class full of seven and eight year olds. The Old Ones are the tentacled, very smelly monsters Nikola has met before. She fights it off with a jar of cesium and the sprinklers, and it turns out to be her Electronic Combat teacher in a robot costume. It was a pop quiz. Nikola got 98 percent.

That's the tone of the whole thing. Nikola talks straight to you, and she's sarcastic about everything. She even asks at one point whether you're comfortable with sarcasm, because otherwise huge chunks of the story won't make sense!

Her friends are all wonderfully odd. Hypatia is her tidy roommate, whose eyes change colour with her mood. Warner can't have a conversation without trying to win it. Fluorine is the principal's granddaughter, who's unstuck in time and might be four or thirty-six on any given day. There's a psychology teacher who's terrified of shoes and a volleyball match won by a member of the audience.

It's a sequel, and it doesn't wait for anyone. In an earlier book Nikola's home was destroyed and her dad was taken to some unknown place, and she's still trying to find him. She cheerfully tells new readers to try and keep up. Most will manage, because the jokes carry you along, but a child who likes to start at the beginning should know that.

The humour has a slightly older feel. There are explosions everywhere, lots of jokes about teachers "killing" students in tests (they got better), and a few asides about crushes and dating. It's all played for laughs and nothing is gory. But it suits a confident reader who enjoys a smart-alecky narrator.

If your reader loves real science facts mixed in with the nonsense, they'll get plenty (what really happens when you drop an alkali metal in water?).

What to read next

For another funny first-person story about aliens, other dimensions and a narrator with plenty to say, try My Brother Is a Superhero, in which Luke misses out on superpowers because he went for a wee at exactly the wrong moment.