Read Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 1: The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 1: The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets is a gloriously gross comic adventure for 7 year olds about the class know-it-all who turns himself into a monster.
It's the sixth Captain Underpants book. George and Harold still make comics in their tree house. And their head teacher, Mr Krupp, still turns into a superhero in his pants whenever somebody snaps their fingers (a quick comic at the start fills in anyone new).
This time the trouble is Melvin Sneedly. He gets top marks, he tells on everybody and he thinks George and Harold are SO immature. When the boys make a comic poking fun at him, Melvin swears revenge.
His plan is to fuse himself with the super-strong robot he's built in his bedroom. Then, at the very last second, he sneezes. Into his hands. Can you guess what the machine decides to add as a third ingredient?
Next morning a dripping, jiggling Bionic Booger Boy squelches into class. Things get worse when he catches a cold. Then the whole class goes on a trip to a tissue factory (and Melvin REALLY doesn't like tissues).
Most children will happily read this one on their own. The chapters are short and the pictures do half the work. One whole chapter is a comic George and Harold made themselves, with their own wobbly spelling. In the Flip-E-Rama pages you flick between two drawings so the fight moves.
The jokes are bogeys, bottoms and a very cheeky narrator. At one point George actually shouts at him to stop describing the snot. Melvin's old hamster, Sulu, is now part robot and living in the boys' tree house, and he's a little hero.
Some of it is properly disgusting, and there's a chapter that warns you not to eat first! The monster swallows Mr Krupp whole and very nearly gets the boys too, though it's all cartoon chaos. The boys' ketchup-under-the-toilet-seat trick spreads round the whole school, so you might see a copycat at home. If your reader thinks bogeys are the funniest thing ever, they'll love every page.
This is Part 1 of a two-part story and it ends on a cliffhanger. The adventure carries on in the seventh book, so it's worth having that one lined up.
If they haven't met George, Harold and Mr Krupp before, go back to The Adventures of Captain Underpants. It's the first book in the series, with the same three troublemakers (well, two troublemakers and one very grumpy head teacher).
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