A Crumpet Calamity (Pip Street) by Jo Simmons
| A Crumpet Calamity (Pip Street) by Jo Simmons | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: While certainly derivative in style, this wacky little adventure is good fun and full of just enough invention. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 160 | Date: August 2013 |
| Publisher: Scholastic | |
| ISBN: 9781407132822 | |
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This is not Dip Street, nor Chip Street, this is Pip Street, and it's where Bobby and his best friend Imelda live – but how long Bobby stays depends on his father getting more income at his crumpet factory so they can afford living there. Bobby's idea is to have an open improve-the-crumpet competition, which is immediately popular around town. Also immediately popular, especially with Imelda, is the new boy on Pip Street, who claims to have no interest in cooking crumpets. But is he as perfect as he seems…?
You don't need to read all of this to see the striking influence it bears on its sleeve like a bright Scouts badge saying INFLUENCE. It's evident not only from the first chapter, or first page, but from the first sentence, that this book is aiming for the Mr Gum audience. The narration is wacky – breaking the fourth wall to talk about itself and directly to the audience; the metaphors are weird and wonderful, the similes similarly so. Simmons has successfully grasped the winning formula like one of those flowering nettles only the cool kids know are safe to grasp, and run with it like a running thing that – oh, such style is very addictive, but very hard to do well.
The effortless simplicity here is almost on a par with Stanton, although in all honesty there isn't such a great range of weird and wonderful characters. Likewise the plot of this book – a broken friendship and a potentially lost secret recipe – is a bit on the obvious side. But for the target audience this is fine. It sacrifices the large blank spaces of Gum's pages for a smaller, cute format, it has a very different visual style with digital photos and cartoons combined in the same image, but most importantly it speeds through the fun and invention at a great pace, and spreads its variety of fonts, its humour and quirks evenly throughout. Much like a crumpet needs to be spread with – oh, fer cryin' out loud.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Oliver Fibbs 2: The Giant Boy-Munching Bugs by Steve Hartley is a comic adventure for the young we loved here at the 'Bag.
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