You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yeti!

Steven Butler's You Ain't Seen Nothing Yeti is a gloriously silly adventure for 7 year olds about a magical summer party that gets snowed in.

What happens

Frankie Banister is one thirty-sixth troll. His family runs a secret seaside hotel in Brighton where every guest is a magical creature and humans are strictly not allowed. The cook is a giant spider. The wallpaper gossips. And his great-great-great-granny is a very grumpy troll.

Today is Trogmanay, the biggest party of the magical year (it's held on the longest day of summer). Then a freak blizzard starts heading for Brighton in June. Frankie and his dad are secretly thrilled, because yetis always travel inside a magic snowstorm so nobody spots them. Could Dad's old friend Orfis be on his way?

He is! The Kwinzi family bursts in on an enormous Arctic ulk, and suddenly reception looks like the inside of a giant ice pop. Little Zingri has never seen a ceiling before and shrieks that the sky is wrong!

But the yetis aren't the only new arrivals. A leprechaun called Maudlin Maloney crash-lands a caravan pulled by exhausted flying chickens. She came for the sunshine, and she is FURIOUS about the snow. Before long she's cursing the whole party. And then Nancy's soup really does start turning into snot...

Frankie talks straight to the reader, so it's like being shown round by a very excitable tour guide. There are made-up words everywhere (nonkumbumps, amazerous, belly-bungling) that your reader will probably be saying at dinner for a week.

It's gross in the best way too. Seagull-snot soup, a leprechaun with shrunken heads hanging from her belt (one of them used to be her aunt) and a tooth fairy dangling from a chandelier by her knickers. If your reader thinks that sounds hilarious, they're in for a treat.

There's a mystery bubbling away underneath as well. Why does the leprechaun know Frankie's embarrassing middle name? And who is the boy in the old family portrait nobody can explain?

What to read next

This comes after the first Frankie Banister book, and Frankie catches you up quickly if you've missed it. If you'd rather start at the beginning, try the very first Nothing to See Here Hotel book, where Frankie introduces his troll granny and the whole bonkers family.