Stinkbomb and Ketchup-Face and the Quest for the Magic Porcupine by John Dougherty and David Tazzyman (illustrator)
| Stinkbomb and Ketchup-Face and the Quest for the Magic Porcupine by John Dougherty and David Tazzyman (illustrator) | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: A deliriously bonkers sequel in this series of anything-goes adventures. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 192 | Date: August 2014 |
| Publisher: OUP Oxford | |
| ISBN: 9780192734976 | |
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Here's an abject lesson for you – when you've got a large collection of evil badgers in your prison, don't let them play with a Monopoly set. For one thing one of them will eat all the fake banknotes, and for another it will come with a 'get out of jail free' card. Then the rain will be mucky and smell of bananas, and the King will come knocking on the door and asking for help and suggesting the butcher in the post office is the best person to tell you about stories and might give a clue as to how best to go about living through this one. And it'll still only be chapter four.
There is no way around it – this book is impossible to summarise with anything like the full-on stupid silliness of the actual thing. For one thing, it carries that stupid silliness – and there really is no other description for it – with as much aplomb as you could imagine. But don't get me wrong – it is the best kind of stupid and the greatest kind of silly. It's almost as if everything has been building up to this – years of Mr Gum-styled wackiness, from franchises great and small, all culminating here. There's a bad song, there're wacky fonts and inventive design, and pages where the writing's white on black. There are returning characters such as the loyal shopping trolley steed of the bonkers king, and the one-cat army, but also new ones, such as the appropriately-named bus drivers, and – well, that would be telling.
So why doesn't it get a full five stars? Surely this is the sine qua non of books such as this. It is the daftest book and what's more it's almost the most post-modern (as it might be called) – perpetually aware of being a book where the characters are aware of being in a book, and making them all aware which chapter they're in, and forcing them to wait for the right page before the plot can continue. It has some level of daftness on every page – you get the feeling some of them could be sheer blankness and John Dougherty could still raise a smirk with them.
Well, for me there was a tiny wee regretful feeling that the book was trying too hard. Too many words are given a bold emphasis for little real reason. And the whole self-aware I'm a book and I'm aware I'm a finished thing even if the people in my story don't know how I end shtick is carried perhaps a little too far – certainly if you look past the daftness later on you see the kind-of hurried ending, and a 'word count reached' tidiness to proceedings. One or two of the jokes don't come across as perfectly succinctly as they might – the jolly Mr Jolly for one.
But strike that if tiny wee feelings of mine are of no concern to you, and perhaps they shouldn't be. Take King Toothbrush Weasel's idiocy, marry it with the friendly energy of the titular heroes and add in the most thinly-disguised criminals in children's literature, and you have something that ninja librarians (and possibly bookish butchers in post offices) would only be happy to see – something that is practically guaranteed to create great enjoyment in the young.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
The Badness of Badgers was the first in the series. Mr Gum and the Biscuit Billionaire by Andy Stanton and David Tazzyman is a part of a reissued series from, of course, the same illustrator.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Stinkbomb and Ketchup-Face and the Quest for the Magic Porcupine by John Dougherty and David Tazzyman (illustrator) 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 Stinkbomb and Ketchup-Face and the Quest for the Magic Porcupine by John Dougherty and David Tazzyman (illustrator) at Amazon.com.
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