Unexpected Twist! An Oliver Twisted Tale

This Oliver Twisted Tale from Michael Rosen is a school story for 9 year olds about a new girl whose life starts to look a lot like the book her class is reading.

What happens

Shona walks into Class X10 halfway through an English lesson. Her trainers are cracked and she's still wearing her old school's uniform. Miss Cavani sits her next to Harry and carries straight on with Oliver Twist.

Things are hard at home. Dad's benefits have been stopped, so they're packing up the flat to move into a room near the market. Nan runs a stall there, where there's always a bit of "I'll do you a favour if you do me a favour" going on. And Nan has just told Shona that this time, the hospital says it's serious.

School is a maze too. Shona gets a detention for not wearing a lanyard, when the lanyard machine is broken! A maths teacher tries to help her in a test and somehow makes her feel ten times worse. Who hasn't had a teacher like that?

Then somebody gives Shona a mobile phone, and she starts to suspect that a present like that comes with strings attached. (The full title is Unexpected Twist! An Oliver Twisted Tale, and you can see where it's heading.)

Reading it feels like sitting at the back of the classroom. Real chunks of Dickens turn up between the chapters as the class reads them aloud. One morning Miss Cavani announces the school will no longer feed students at lunch, only teachers. It's one of her tricks, and the class ends up voting on whether she made it up. It's very funny and very clever, because Oliver is about to ask for more.

Shona is a brilliant girl to root for. She's quiet and very direct, and trouble seems to find her whether she's done anything or not. You'll probably want to march into that school and have a word on her behalf!

The Dickens passages don't soften anything. Oliver's mother dies in the first one the class reads, and the workhouse boys go hungry and get beaten. Nan's illness and the money worries are handled gently, but they're real. For a reader who's never met Dickens before, this is a very friendly way in.

What to read next

For more of Miss Cavani's lessons, there's Michael Rosen's Bah! Humbug! It's Christmas Eve and the school play is A Christmas Carol, with a boy called Harry playing Scrooge and Rory, Sunil and Crayton out on stage as street sellers.