Holidays According to Humphrey by Betty G Birney

Holidays According to Humphrey by Betty G Birney
Buy Holidays According to Humphrey by Betty G Birney at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Confident Readers
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: A heart-warming mix of friendship lessons and brilliant adventure. If this is the quality of this series at the sixth entry, count me in.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 208	Date: January 2010
Publisher: Faber Children's Books
ISBN: 978-0571250905
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Humphrey the hamster is worried. Everywhere he turns his little pink ears he hears noises about the school being closed. How can he survive without all his adoring fans in room 26, and what is life like for a classroom pet without a classroom? Luckily, this is only the summer holiday he is misunderstanding, and what do you know - he will soon be meeting familiar faces, not at school, but at summer camp.

This will be the cue for a dazzling adventure for him, where he can tackle mysterious creatures both real and imagined, great escapes, and tackle the human friendships around him with his natural brilliant intelligence.

I use that word - natural - guardedly, for this is a heavily anthropomorphised hamster. However his narration and his character are both superlative. Witness his habits with his wheel and hamster ball, the way he stresses things in threes, the way he tells us humans things in sentences that to us are purely squeaks, and his even more unusual conversations with his best friend and colleague, Og the Frog, who only ever replies with BOING!.

Every chapter ends with a tidy little motto, and there are easy lessons here for Humphrey and the humans around him about friendships - how to form them, get through them and patch them up with a simple bit of thought - but nothing is cloying. It's just perfectly judged, as is the plot of the whole fortnight, which has just as much action and entertainment as you could wish for.

I won't go so far as to say that this book will be remembered by the reader when they head off to summer camp (I went when I was 14), but for the under-tens this is a perfect read. It's a fine tale told exceedingly well, and the emotions are wrought from it with infinite ease. There will be tears shed on the final pages here, I assure you.

I do enjoy a pleasant surprise, and the biggest one for me here was not the depth of the plot, or the excellent character of Humphrey, but how sustained this series would appear to be in volume six. I can only say this, and therefore the whole ongoing set, is unsqueakably good, and highly recommended.

I must thank the kind people at Faber Kids' for my review copy.

The Great Hamster Massacre by Katie Davies has a different take on this furry pet - don't worry, it's nowhere near as off-putting as that title may appear to some.

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You can read more book reviews or buy Holidays According to Humphrey by Betty G Birney at Amazon.com.

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