Moone Boy: the Blunder Years by Chris O'Dowd and Nick Vincent Murphy

Moone Boy: the Blunder Years by Chris O'Dowd and Nick Vincent Murphy
Buy Moone Boy: the Blunder Years by Chris O'Dowd and Nick Vincent Murphy at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Confident Readers
Reviewer: Ruth Ng
Summary: Completely daft and very readable!
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 384	Date: October 2014
Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books
ISBN: 9781447270942
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Poor Martin Moone, surrounded by his sisters who drive him crazy, he decides to get himself an imaginary friend. He enlists the help of his friend who already has an imaginary friend, and thus begins a wild adventure because what happens when the imaginary friend you imagine isn't any good at being your imaginary friend, and who you'd really like to be your imaginary friend is the customer services representative who comes to try and help you out?!

Yes, this is silliness, but it's very well done silliness! It's the same story as the TV show Moone Boy, but obviously with all the little details and jokes you don't get within a television show but find in a book. Written by Chris O'Dowd and his friend Nick Vincent Murphy, you can't help but hear Chris' voice throughout the book. It's full of gentle humour, and of Martin Moone being almost ridiculously stupid about things. I spent half the book laughing to myself, and the other half wanting to give Martin a good shake to try and wake him up!

The book is littered with definitions, to help you along with the Irish slang and more generally, any term that a reader might be unsure of, or that (more likely) the author thought would be hilarious to define! They are funny, and kids seem to love that kind of interruption in their stories. Under normal circumstances, it would drive me mad having to stop and read those all the time, but I played fair and pretended to be 10 years old for the sake of this review! I have to say, I don't think I'd get all that much if I were to read this aloud as a bedtime story, but really this is the kind of book that kids disappear upstairs to read by themselves and you just hear them chortling to themselves, or discussing the funny parts with their own new imaginary friend after they've finished it!

It's hard to pitch the age group this would be best for. I'm sure plenty of nine year olds would love it, but I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be if my son was nine and reading about a boy pimping out a feel of his sister's boobs to another boy in his class! Of course, that bit is in there to shock and be taboo and delight all those silly, silly boys, but then the mother in me, and the feminist in me, did feel uncomfortable reading that part. I still feel a bit awkward when I think about it now. Even though Martin is unsuccessful in his pimping (and he's only doing it in a desperate attempt to get someone to stick up for him against the class bullies) it still feels like the jarring point in an otherwise really great book.

I loved everything about the imaginary friends and all the rituals invented for them. I also felt that it captured the horror of bullying, but without being terribly serious and dull about it all. Had it not been for the boobs misdemeanor this would have been a sure five star book for me! Plenty of fun, and a good long book to keep your little bookworm quiet for a while!

Anyone enjoying this would probably like to look at The Brilliant World of Tom Gates by Liz Pichon or Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days by Jeff Kinney

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You can read more book reviews or buy Moone Boy: the Blunder Years by Chris O'Dowd and Nick Vincent Murphy at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Moone Boy: the Blunder Years by Chris O'Dowd and Nick Vincent Murphy at Amazon.com.

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