Having a seven-year-old boy in the house means many things. There’s a lot of noise and a lot of sharp, pointy bits of plastic left about to be trodden on in the middle of the night. It means coming across football cards in unexpected places – the laundry, next to the loo, at the bottom of the biscuit tin… It also means, for me at least, having a small, willing (usually) Test Reader who is never short of an opinion or two. These opinions are often blunt, sometimes damning, always interesting.
So one day, I nervously persuaded him to set aside his collection of MatchAttax and offered him a bound copy of Danny Danger and the Cosmic Remote by Adam Frost. Sighing in a long-suffering way, he looked at it and then raised his eyebrows. “Coool,” he said. Phew, I thought, tip-toeing from the room (or “lab”), the cover had gone down well.
Pacing up and down in the kitchen, I marvelled at the quiet. It actually took me a while to realise what it was, having briefly thought I’d gone deaf. Eventually I poked my head around the door. The Test Reader was hanging off the sofa, absorbed in Danny’s humorous adventures of dastardly villains and gadgets galore. Danny 1, MatchAttax 0!
And now, it being September, Danny Danger and the Cosmic Remote is published and out there for real. It’s already been Book of the Month at the local primary and if class 2P are anything to go by, it’s going to find a lot of friends out there. Congratulations, Adam, and good luck Danny!
