The Seriously Extraordinary Diary of Pig by Emer Stamp

The Seriously Extraordinary Diary of Pig by Emer Stamp
Buy The Seriously Extraordinary Diary of Pig by Emer Stamp at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Confident Readers
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: Book three in this series, which has been great so far – so why is this a wafer sandwich of a book?
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 224	Date: February 2016
Publisher: Scholastic Press
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781407153223
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Hello. I is very happy to be giving a positive verdict on a third adventure for Pig, who speaks Pig, his best friend Duck, who speaks Pig but in a Duck font, and their best friend Cow who speaks bad. This time the Chickens who was the evil ones is not hardly even mentioned, and the Cat that scared Pig and everyone else in his second book is barely thought of, but there is another bad character to make up for it. But first I is having to report that Pig and Cow and Duck are making a big trouble for themselves, which is causing them to try and save the day and by mistake making the bad character notice Cow. And when I tells you the big trouble happens because Cow tries to hide Cow on the Farmer's roof you will knows just what a silly diary this series is.

And once again you can see, if you've come across these books before, how awkward it is to actually succeed in imitating the unique style of them. It's not just the basic/corrupted English that Pig tells us everything in, it's the bizarre fonts everyone gets to differentiate them – not just used for what they say in the dialogue but for every mention of their name. To me the book was fine – to an extent – until some new characters came along, and really enlivened the page with their own fonts and their own styles of speech, which is partly why these books are so important. The sheer silly, farty jolliness of these books and the daft animal characters are going to be great for people who don't usually pick up books, and certainly not when they're stuffy, smelly old diaries.

Which is why it's important that the young audience gets served correctly. Which is why it was quite poor that I noticed at least half a dozen accidental printing errors. Which is why I have to mention the weird production values used here – this is a paperback to all intents and purposes, but with corrugated boards stuck to the cover. Take a proper hardback apart and you won't get something too different from this, but the way it's presented as clearly something else with card wafers glued on, does make me wonder how blatantly budget-watching the producers of this volume can be.

But to revert to the real producer – Emer Stamp. Once again she has created something really quite charming – there's a great joie de vivre about it all, a sheer silliness that has been sustained from day one, and a typically friendly way of approaching the adventures that means they're clearly presented on the page, and eagerly perused. This book is a little bit more mundane, in that the series started with space-ships, but even having said that we go further this time than before, and the new characters are just a delight. I did wonder now and again if we were building to a series closer – and again, that binding did not help in me not expecting further great things to come – but I cannot say either way. I certainly want there to be more.

I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

The series started here.

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You can read more book reviews or buy The Seriously Extraordinary Diary of Pig by Emer Stamp at Amazon.com.

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