Fred was bored. He didn't like going to the shopping centre with his mum and his little sister. But then by mistake he took the lift to the 99th floor and found an alien who needed his help.

* Copper/Band 12 books provide more complex plots and longer chapters that develop reading stamina.

* Text type: A fantasy story.

* A poster for the computer game on pages 30-31 provides an opportunity to discuss the story and think about how it could be promoted to appeal to children.

* Curriculum links: Art and Design: Viewpoints; Citizenship: Choices.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 32 pages in this book. This book was published 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Jenny Nimmo is the acclaimed author of the Charlie Bone series. She has won several significant awards for her children's books, including the Nestle Smarties Book Prize and the Tir na n-Og Welsh Arts Council award for The Snow Spider. She lives in Wales with her husband, David. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Jonathan was born in 1965, the son of a rig fitter and a primary school teacher. He first developed his skills as a writer and illustrator while studying architecture, illustrating poems and lyrics that he had written. After leaving college, he worked as an architect for several years, before pursuing a career in children's books. In addition to writing books such as Bringing Down the Moon, and Ruby Flew Too, he also paper-engineers pop-up books.