Charlie and the Grandmothers by Katy Towell is a properly creepy story for 10 year olds about two children sent to stay with a grandmother they’ve never heard of.<\/p>\n
Charlie Oughtt is twelve and frightened of everything. He worries about flooding on a cloudless day and wildfires when the rain won’t stop. He hasn’t slept properly in six years, not since a tall, sad man knocked on the door with his hat in his hands to say there’d been an accident at the mill and their father wasn’t coming home.<\/p>\n
His sister Georgie is eight and frightened of nothing at all. She comes home with muddy frocks and scraped shins and an excellent line in excuses.<\/p>\n
Here’s the thing Charlie has noticed and nobody else has. All year, children in their town have been going away to visit their grandmothers. Not one of them has come back. Their parents don’t even wave them off.<\/p>\n
Then comes the darkest night. The streetlamps go out. The moon goes out. The stars go out one by one. Charlie presses his ear to the wall and hears his mother murmuring in her sleep, and something whispering back at her in a childish sing-song.<\/p>\n
In the morning she’s humming happily and has wonderful news. A letter has come from Grandmother Pearl, and wouldn’t a winter on her farm be lovely?<\/p>\n
They do not have a Grandmother Pearl.<\/p>\n
I’ll leave it there, but there’s a train, and a house, and two women who would both like to be called Grandmother.<\/p>\n
The writing is the treat. The narrator is dry and funny about Charlie in a way that never mocks him. His face has “two inverted parentheses” between the eyebrows and “commas at the corners” of his mouth, and one curl that sticks up like a question mark. Georgie’s cheerful nonsense keeps puncturing the dread. Then the dread comes back.<\/p>\n
Worth knowing that this is genuinely frightening and the fear is the domestic sort, which is the kind that sticks. A parent who loves her children is talked into sending them away by something in her bedroom. She’s then too unwell to help. Children go missing and no adult minds. Charlie’s father died six years before the story opens, which is told plainly on the first page and is backstory rather than something that happens to you as you read.<\/p>\n
So this isn’t the one for a child who’s already nervous about the dark or about grown-ups behaving oddly. For a ten year old who hoovers up spooky stories and wants one that’s actually well written, it’s a good night in.<\/p>\n
If that’s the sort of scared they enjoy, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline does something similar in an old house with a small door in it, where there’s another mother who would very much like to keep her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Charlie and the Grandmothers by Katy Towell is a properly creepy story for 10 year olds about two children sent to stay with a grandmother they’ve never heard of. Charlie Oughtt is twelve and frightened of everything. He worries about flooding on a cloudless day and wildfires when the rain won’t stop. He hasn’t slept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11395,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":7113,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Neil Gaiman's Coraline","lr_seo_hook":"Children keep leaving to visit a grandmother and none of them come back."},"book_tag":[1051],"age_group":[29],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[561],"class_list":["post-7066","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-scary-books","age_group-books-for-10-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-katy-towell"],"yoast_title":"Charlie and the Grandmothers by Katy Towell | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Children keep leaving to visit a grandmother and none of them come back. For ages 10+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n