Wings

Terry Pratchett's Wings is a very small-scale adventure for 9 year olds, starring three four-inch people trying to get themselves onto a jet plane.

What happens

Masklin, Gurder and Angalo are sitting in an airport bin, sharing the end of a cold greasy chip and watching humans go past. Hundreds of humans. It is starting to dawn on Masklin that getting on a plane is not like stealing a truck.

Nomes are four inches high and they live about ten times faster than we do, so they're harder to spot than a high-speed mouse. That, plus the fact that people are very good at not seeing things they know can't be there.

They're looking for a man called Grandson Richard, 39.

Gurder used to be the Abbot back in the Store, and he still thinks there's an Arnold Bros. somewhere keeping an eye on nomekind. Angalo doesn't believe in Arnold Bros. at all, and rather enjoys having him around to not believe in. The two of them argue about it more or less constantly.

Which leaves Masklin holding the Thing. The Thing is a small black cube that knows everything and only speaks when it feels like it. So Masklin blackmails it. He explains, very calmly, that they'll walk away and leave it on an airport floor forever, and it can spend the next few centuries thinking about that.

One red light comes on. Then a fainter second one. Then, "How can I be of assistance?"

It finds the right man in three hundred microseconds and adds that three hundred microseconds is a long time.

That's the whole flavour of it. Everybody reasons impeccably from facts that are slightly wrong, and off they go. Masklin genuinely did think a jet was a truck with more wings and fewer wheels.

There's a lovely bit early on where the book leaves the nomes entirely and goes to a frog living in a flower up a mountain nine thousand miles away, who crawls round a petal one day and sees the universe. Pratchett does that and then carries on as if nothing happened.

One practical thing. This one picks up after the nomes have already left the Store and settled in the quarry, so a reader who starts here will meet the Abbot, the Thing and the Long Drive as things everyone already knows about. It still makes sense. It's just funnier if you've met them properly.

The edition is American too, so your reader gets french fries and airplanes rather than chips and planes.

What to read next

Diggers comes earlier, and it's where the nomes move into the abandoned quarry and find out that water comes down out of the sky in frozen bits.