The book is about how money doesn’t measure happiness, wealth or a good life, wealth is measured by your relationships with friends and family and the bonds you make throughout life. However, during a short-lived career as an assistant at a puppet show, he earned a fortune entirely in small change. Damien is a fourth grade student in England on the brink of the (imaginary) Pound/Euro currency changeover. The structure of the novel is neat and clear, simplistic vocabulary is used and the variety of characters is pleasing.

I totally understood Damian's obsession with saints after his mother passed away, and his need to be pious and excellent. He was always optimistic and his happiness was very contagious for me as a reader and his personality and point of view for the story was very different from any other first person book I’ve read. While you are hearing your father’s words to be ‘excellent’, following the guidance of the saints, your brother is more of a real-estate baron, it seems….This is a wonderful read for all ages, and thought not super Christmassy, I am still adding it to my December repertoire. This is a noteworthy book with a truly deep and emotional side to it that perfectly combines fun, adventure, and humor into the sensitive issues. The book is about a young boy named Damian who is obsessed with catholic saints and his older brother Anthony and the problems they get into after Damian finds a bag of pounds, north of two-hundred and thirty thousand pounds to be exact. Millions is about two young brothers who come across millions of pounds and their decisions on what they do with it.

What would you do if you were praying for a miracle that would make everything better, when a bag full of money falls from the heavens? Damian and his brother, Anthony, have recently lost their mother, and their father is doing all that he can to raise them well.

Frank's first book, Millions, won the CILIP Carnegie Medal in 2004 and has been shortlisted for a number of awards, including the Guardian Children's Fiction Award 2004. The story started out very slow but after finding the money, the story became very fast and many events occurred over a short time which made it hard to pick up every little detail and most of the important aspects of the story were hinted at by those little details. Damian's obsession with "being excellent" made him an unusual and memorable main character whose circular, well-intentioned and slightly batty attempts to make sense of adult worry-logic and comfort himself with it would resonate with anxious conscientious young readers.

It's a story about 2 brothers who are each dealing with the loss of their mother in different ways, and a father who reminds them to be excellent. This book reads like a mad cap comic adventure/mystery/coming of age tale but is also a study in childhood grief and as is usual for this author the father son relationship is central to the plot . I read some chapters aloud to my younger sister (who is cool as a cucumber by temperament) and she laughed out loud to hear his antic reasoning, proving that for those who don't identify, there is much pleasure to be had from visiting Damian's corner of kook for a while. They’re scared to admit that Dorothy’s lasagna is better because they feel if they do they will lose their old mom. Prez has one summer to find ten things about the earth that make it worth saving - but can he do it?His second book, Framed was inspired by a news story he’d read in an old scrapbook: During the Second World War, a collection of valuable paintings from the National Gallery was hidden in a slate mine for safekeeping. The ceremony was met with worldwide acclaim and even included a section inspired by children's books. It was such a pleasure to meet you both, and I really appreciated how smoothly and professionally you ran everything. However I think that making the characters younger helped me to relate to them a little bit and I’m sure other people experience some of the situations that are touched upon in this book. Damien's literal take on life, his pure heart, and his obsession with the lives of catholic saints is classic Cottrell Boyce and is both hilarious and poignant.

When a huge bag stuffed with more than 200,000 quid comes flying out of the sky and into Damian’s cardboard “hermitage” (i. Another book which makes me wish goodreads allowed me to use 1/2 stars because this book is worthy of more than three but less than four. However, I personally found the sequencing of the invents a little confusing, with more and more problems rising in the plot where least expected. Furthermore, we are caught in a ‘should they/ shouldn’t they’ moral dilemma of whether Damian and Anthony should hand in the money. He has also written episodes of Coronation Street and Brookside, so you probably know his stories from your TV set.It seems that they’re at loggerheads over this too, with Damian convinced that the saints need thanking for their intervention in his life. He couldn’t resist imagining how all of that great art might have affected the people who lived near the mine. Even though the novel is written in Damian's perspective, it seems like their is still this barrier between the emotions and what is actually happening.