The World’s Worst Alien
Alice Primmer, illustrated by Fred Blunt
Walker Books

This is a slice of life as lived and narrated by Sky, an alien student who has somehow created planet Earth for her school project. However, rather than the dinosaurs she hoped to find living thereon, it’s the age of humans and they appear to be doing a very good job of ruining the entire planet. Bang goes the good grades she’s desperately wanting. Sky decides to change her form and spend time on Earth, in in order to sort things out, without she hopes, having to do too much work before returning from whence she came.

On arriving in London, she experiences cold for the first time and the attire she’s wearing is modelled on the gear worn by YouTube influencers and so totally inappropriate for the climate. But as well as having no name and no place to live, she has no clothes to change in to and off she goes to school straight to a year six classroom where the other pupils are led to believe she’s from Antarctica There she makes friends (kind of) with a girl named Zana to whom she confides that she wants to be an influencer on You Tube without having the first clue about the topic of her videos. Zana invites her new friend to stay the night with her, telling her mother that she’s an exchange student but the school forgot to book her accommodation.

From then on things get progressively more crazy and chaotic: there are unfair doings going on around her (giraffes to release from the zoo) as well as local environmental causes to become involved with.

A funny story that looks at humans from the perspective of an outsider: what though will Sky’s impressions of we Earthlings be by the time she’s completed her project? Alice Primmer’s debut children’s novel gives readers plenty to ponder on, laugh at and talk about, and there’s a plethora of Fred Blunt’s zany illustrations to accompany the silly situations Sky et al find themselves in.