Secondhand Chapter Book (Age 7-10) Bargain Book Box SP4060

Secondhand Chapter Book (Age 7-10) Bargain Book Box SP4060

The two authors who get seven-year-olds reading under the covers, in one box: Roald Dahl’s big hitters from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to The BFG, and David Walliams from Mr Stink to The Midnight Gang. Enid Blyton, David Baddiel and Dermot O’Leary fill the gaps. Some covers may carry price stickers or sticker residue.

1. Mr Stink — David Walliams — Chloe hides a tramp in the garden shed because he’s kinder than anyone in her house. Her mother is running for Parliament on a platform of clearing the streets. Walliams’ second book and the one where his heart is most on show.
2. George’s Marvellous Medicine — Roald Dahl — George’s grandmother is a horror, so he brews her a new medicine from everything in the house: shampoo, engine oil, animal pills. She grows through the roof. Short, anarchic, and the one kids try to recreate.
3. Fantastic Mr Fox — Roald Dahl — Boggis, Bunce and Bean dig up the hill to get Mr Fox, and he digs down to get their larders. A siege story told from the underdog’s burrow. Still the best read-aloud in the Dahl shelf.
4. The Boy in the Dress — David Walliams — Dennis loves football and his mum’s old Vogue magazines. His friend Lisa talks him into a borrowed dress and a day at school as “Denise.” Walliams’ debut, and more tender than anything he’s written since.
5. Gangsta Granny — David Walliams — Ben’s Friday nights at Granny’s are cabbage soup and Scrabble, until he finds a tin of jewels under her sink. She’s an international thief, and she’s planning one last job: the Crown Jewels. The ending floors seven-year-olds.
6. Ratburger — David Walliams — Zoe’s dad has given up, her stepmother is monstrous, and her only friend is a rat. Then a man called Burt turns up with a burger van and a plan for the rat. Walliams’ darkest and, for many readers, his funniest.
7. Grandpa’s Great Escape — David Walliams — Grandpa thinks it’s still 1940 and he’s a Spitfire pilot. Jack is the only one who plays along, and when Grandpa is locked up in Twilight Towers, Jack plans a breakout. The ending in the Spitfire is a proper lump-in-throat moment.
8. Boy: Tales of Childhood — Roald Dahl — The Great Mouse Plot, the sweet shop, the beatings at Repton, the summers in Norway. Dahl’s real childhood is where every villainous headmistress and evil aunt came from, and he tells it like fiction.
9. Esio Trot — Roald Dahl — Mr Hoppy loves Mrs Silver, Mrs Silver loves her tortoise Alfie, and Mr Hoppy’s plan involves 140 tortoises and a spell written backwards. Short, sweet, and funnier than it sounds.
10. The Magic Finger — Roald Dahl — A girl gets angry at the family next door for shooting ducks, points her finger, and they wake up the size of birds with the ducks in their house holding the guns. Forty pages, hard to forget.
11. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator — Roald Dahl — The elevator goes into orbit, Grandma Georgina takes too much Wonka-Vite and ends up minus two years old, and the Vermicious Knids attack a space hotel. Wilder and stranger than the first book.
12. The Parent Agency — David Baddiel — Barry wishes for better parents and wakes in a world where children choose them from a catalogue. He trials five sets. The rich ones, the famous ones and the “cool” ones all fail in ways he didn’t see coming.
13. The King of Lost Souls — Maria Motunrayo Adebisi — Koku is a London kid who can’t control the Yoruba spirit magic waking inside him, and the creatures hunting him know it. Percy Jackson pace with a mythology most readers won’t have met yet.
14. Five Run Away Together — Enid Blyton — The Sticks, the nastiest villains Blyton ever wrote, take over Kirrin Cottage, so the Five camp out on the island and find a kidnapped girl in the dungeons. Peak Famous Five.
15. The Secret Seven — Enid Blyton — The one that started it: a shed, a password, and a sleigh track in the snow leading to a house with a prisoner in it. The series’ whole appeal in one book.
16. James and the Giant Peach — Roald Dahl — James’s aunts are crushed by the peach in chapter one, which tells you the kind of book this is. He crosses the Atlantic inside it with a grasshopper, a spider and a centipede who won’t stop talking.
17. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — Roald Dahl — Five golden tickets, four awful children, and a factory that deals with each of them. The book is meaner and better than either film, and the Oompa-Loompa songs are the best bits.
18. The BFG — Roald Dahl — Sophie is snatched from her orphanage window by a giant who turns out to be the only one that doesn’t eat children. Dreams in jars, snozzcumbers and a plan involving the Queen.
19. Wings of Glory — Dermot O’Leary — Alfie is a penguin who can’t fly, in a war being fought in the air. He joins a secret animal squadron anyway. Underdog story with proper wartime stakes and Claire Powell’s illustrations.
20. The Midnight Gang — David Walliams — Tom wakes on a hospital children’s ward run by a cruel matron, and finds the other patients sneak out at midnight to grant each other’s wishes. The porter’s story will get you. Walliams’ kindest book.