Tumble & Blue

A boy who loses at absolutely everything is the hero of Cassie Beasley's Tumble & Blue, a swampy, funny Georgia story for 8 year olds.

What happens

Blue Montgomery arrives at his granny's house at exactly midnight. His dad drops the bag on the porch, says he has to be getting on, and drives off across the yard without a hug.

Murky Branch has a population of 339 and no phone signal. Blue does not really know these people.

He does know the family story. Back in 1817 two fools reached a golden alligator in the swamp on the same night, under a red moon, and the luck they were fighting over split in half. Ever since, some Montgomerys get wonderful fates and some get dreadful ones.

Blue's fate is losing. Not losing sometimes. Losing always. Spelling bees, video games, hide-and-seek. He cannot win a game of tic-tac-toe.

The red moon is due again this summer, which is why the relatives are coming, and why Blue is fairly sure his dad left him here on purpose.

Then there is Ma Myrtle. She is his great-grandmother and she is up on the roof of the care home in her nightdress, tearing the family history book to shreds and throwing the pages at the moon.

Next door a girl in a Maximal Star nightshirt runs up with a first aid kit and asks whether he is having heart trouble. Her name is Tumble. She would prefer to be thought of as potentially extraordinary.

The chapters swap between the two of them, and they are such different company that the book never sits still. Blue is all weather and worry. Tumble is all plans.

A note on the sad bits, because they are real ones. Ma Myrtle's talent is knowing when she is going to die, and she has just seen her own end, which is why the whole family is descending. Blue's dad keeps promising to call and does not.

Your reader will probably feel that second one more than the first. The book is warm about it rather than bleak, and the jokes never stop for long.

What to read next

If they take to the way this one mixes family legend with a child who has been left somewhere strange, Circus Mirandus is by the same author and does something similar. A boy hangs on to his grandpa's stories about a magic circus, and a promise made to him during the war.