Several Things Are Alive and Well and Living in Alfred Brown's Head

Gaelyn Gordon (author)

Collins, NZ: 1990; 102pp

ISBN: 1869500172

Genres: humour, science fiction

The humorous title of this short novel captures exactly the tone and nature of the narrative.

Alfred Brown, teenager, is good at sleeping. And eating. Other than that, life can take care of itself and he'll join in or not according to how he feels on the day.

So when he comes down to breakfast one morning and his sisters inform him that he is invisible above the eyebrows and will he please stop it immediately because it's making them feel sick, he doesn't realise that they are serious. When he starts hearing voices, however, he realises that things are not as they once were.

It seems that Alfred has been selected as the unwilling host to a female ‘student operator' from what she assures him is a vastly superior civilisation. Oppy, as Alfred and his sisters name her, is visiting Earth - through Alfred's senses - in order to study a ‘primitive life form'. Although he doesn't take too kindly to being called ‘primitive', Alfred soon comes to an arrangement with Oppy. The side benefits to him are, after all, quite thrilling. He develops superhuman powers and can levitate, translocate, manipulate others, and achieve any number of quite remarkable results, all with the powers of his mind when Oppy taps into them.

This leads to a series of hilarious adventures of the kind that will really appeal to children, as they are exactly the kind of things that they daydream about, although as Alfred discovers, sometimes things don't turn out quite the way he had intended. Short chapters that invariably leave the reader ‘up in the air' guarantee that pages will turn quickly.

Good for shared or independent reading.