Grubtown Tales: When Bunnies Turn Bad by Philip Ardagh
| Grubtown Tales: When Bunnies Turn Bad by Philip Ardagh | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Another sterling example of the weird and wonderful series of odd shenanigans. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 160 | Date: May 2011 |
| Publisher: Faber Children's Books | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-0571272365 | |
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This book is a lesson in never assuming anything you shouldn't. Just because Jilly Cheeter and Mango Claptrap are on the cover, don't assume it isn't about a lad called Failing Toucan instead - because if you did, you'd be wrong. While on the subject of the noteworthy names used throughout Grubtown, never assume to know the gender of someone called Asphalt Nosegay. And just because it's called When Bunnies Turn Bad, and has lots of rabbits on the cover and throughout, don't assume it isn't about the dangerous and tangled task of taking a chimp back to the old folks' home where he lives.
Jilly, she who used to be a duck wrangler for the town, and Mango, with his exceedingly small shorts, are up to their usual japes - getting stuck into solving the town's problems, involving stupid and weird people, noticeably less stupid and weird animals, and strange happenings. You don't need to have read any of the other books in the series - until, that is, of course, after you've read this one and seen how brilliant they are.
I finally got a further benefit of the weirdness of these books on my second perusal of this one. After all the rabbits and monkey business are seen to, we get a story of the town library. Any editor might think this was an odd tack-on, but the slapdash-seeming whimsy of Beardy Ardagh will not be picked up on so easily by the young readers for whom he writes this series, and so it just gets to be an even fuller, even funnier, even wackier example of what makes reading great. And these books, with this quality, are definitely proof of that.
I must thank the publishers at Faber for my review copy. You might like to have a look at the Grubtown website too.
I first met the series with The Wrong End of the Dog. A similar reason for a glut of furry critters plaguing a place can be seen in the similarly humorous and engaging Magic and Mayhem by Marcus Sedgwick.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Grubtown Tales: When Bunnies Turn Bad by Philip Ardagh at Amazon.com.
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