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Simon Farnaby's The Wizard In My Shed is a gloriously daft comedy for 8 year olds about a warlock from the Dark Ages who lands in a modern shopping centre.
It starts in the year 511. Merdyn the Wild is on trial, floating in chains and bellowing that he's the greatest warlock of all time. His old rival from magic school reads out the sentence, flips to the wrong spell, and Merdyn vanishes.
He pops up in a fake garden in the Oldwell Shopping Centre, just off the M3 (the narrator keeps reminding you). He thinks he's in Hell. He fights two security guards with a plastic tree, runs smack into a shop window and decides the sliding doors are the jaws of a dragon.
Meanwhile Rose Falvey is having the worst day. Her high-kicking Beyoncé number at the school talent show has gone viral for all the wrong reasons, and the school bullies are waiting outside. Her only real friend is Bubbles, a yellow guinea pig.
So Rose decides to run away to Paris with ten pounds. In the woods she bumps into a very smelly man in a pointy hat who tries to eat Bubbles.
To prove he's magic, Merdyn presses a pinecone to Bubbles's head and they can suddenly hear the guinea pig's thoughts. Bubbles turns out to be a nervous wreck! If Rose helps Merdyn get home, he'll make her a brilliant singer.
The narrator chats to your reader the whole way through, with footnotes explaining Dark Ages insults like "fopdoodle". The jokes come thick and fast. There is also a LOT of guinea pig poo.
There's real sadness under the silliness, though, and you should know about it. Rose's dad died suddenly four years ago. That's backstory, not something that happens in the book. Her mum is still grieving, stays on the sofa in her pyjamas and tells Rose to give up singing. A bully throws a stick at Rose's head.
If your reader has lost someone close, that might hit home. It's handled with a light touch, and Rose is such a trier that you're rooting for her from page one.
If they love a wizard from long ago and a narrator who keeps butting in, try The Wizards of Once next. It's set in the dark wildwoods of an ancient Britain, where a young Wizard called Xar sneaks into the Badwoods to set a trap for a Witch.
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