Rating: 5/5
This book was about a little girl called Lizzie who’s dad is joining the Human Birdman Competition. The competition was ‘who can be a bird and use a technique to fly over the Tyne’. Obviously Lizzie doesn’t understand, but when she and her dad make a bird’s nest, two crests, too beaks, two pairs of wings and signs up on Mr Poop’s document, she understands that her dad is just that little bit crazy.
Lizzie’s auntie, Doreen, thinks that this is all utter nonsense (which it is) and calls in Lizzie’s head teacher, Mr Mint, to take Lizzie away from her dad’s craziness. But Lizzie doesn’t want to, and in the end, she and her clever dad (and even Mr Mint) all entered the competition…
…And failed.
“But that doesn’t matter, Dad,” Lizzie would keep saying, “We had fun making the beaks and crests and wings – and it’s not over. We can do that again. So it’s not bad that we failed. It would be better if we won, but we didn’t, and that’s fine.”
This book was more of a strange one, and David Almond must have had a very odd imagination to come up with a man who’d like to enter a bird competition. But some people do have odd ideas, and I’m not saying that David’s book wasn’t good and that David was weird.