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==Confident readers==
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{{newreview
|author=Ivan Brett
|title=Casper Candlewacks in the Claws of Crime!
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=This is the second outing for Casper and his friend Lamp, who likes inventing things, but don't worry if you haven't read the first book: this one is fine as a stand-alone. Casper's village is chock-full of idiots, who spend their time doing such ridiculous things you wonder how most of them managed to survive to adulthood. But the idiocy in these books does not encourage the reader, or indeed the author, to sneer: rather, it is a fond and glorious celebration of eccentricity taken to such extremes that it almost seems a different form of sanity. And it seems little lasting damage is done, either. People fall down, over and into things regularly, but never seem to suffer anything worse than a few cuts and bruises. A poor old lady in a wheelchair is thumped over the head, but the next time we see her she's grinning at the crowd and slapping her head to demonstrate what happened. And Casper's mum is such a bad cook she doesn't even take food out of the tin before cooking it, but no one starves. All in all, reading and enjoying the antics of the inhabitants of Corne-on-the-Kobb requires a major suspension of disbelief, which is of course not going to be a problem for the majority of the confident readers these books are written for. Indeed, the only difficulty such readers are going to have is to get through a whole paragraph of the book without dashing off to find someone to read a choice expression or joke to.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>000741157X</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Stephen Mackey