The Diary of Dennis the Menace: The Great Escape by Steven Butler
| The Diary of Dennis the Menace: The Great Escape by Steven Butler | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Filled with hyperbole and the highly obvious, this is still fun for the target audience. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 176 | Date: February 2016 |
| Publisher: Puffin | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9780141355863 | |
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Poor Dennis the Menace. He thinks he's sorted his life out, and got rid of the Bum-Face wimp he loves to hate so much. His school, the Bash Street, is giving the winner of an exam they are holding the chance to upgrade to the snotty Posh Street equivalent, which is a nightmare full of books (and worse) and is actually a boarding school – yes, one of those places for people who seriously want to live in a school. Clearly the exam will only have one winner – said wimp, Walter the Softy. But like I say, Dennis only thinks he has his life sorted – sometimes it can come round to bite him on the bum, and sort him out…
You can see what is going to happen, even without the back cover blurb giving the game away, and leaving about the last ten pages as a surprise. And pages are quite scarce in this volume – there never have been many, but there seem even more pages here with very little on – Dennis bracing us for his shocking news in the largest of handwritten fonts, Dennis cartooning his life in front of us to show how kinetic, violent and messy it is, Dennis signing off as an ex-Menace…
Still, these books have never been the sort to fetch up in Posh Street School library. They are, as I say, incredibly scrappy in look, and designed to clearly be a potential product of Dennis's menacing lessons, and ripe for the young Dennis wannabes, of either gender. That way they both fit the franchise and have nothing in them to possibly stop the audience relating to them fully. I enjoy the series greatly, even at very much the wrong age for them. I think the audience for this example will relate to it once more, but I do think a few will see the wool being pulled over their eyes a little – the wool belonging to a threadbare jumper, that while in the traditional red and black stripes does have a little less going for it in the way of surprise, novelty and drama than usual.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
We first met the series here.
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