Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People

Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People is a properly bonkers comic adventure for 7 year olds where George and Harold come face to face with their own evil twins.

What happens

It's the eighth Captain Underpants book and it carries straight on from the seventh. The boys' time machine (a purple portable toilet, naturally) is supposed to carry Crackers the pterodactyl home to the age of the dinosaurs. Instead it lands them in their own school library.

Except everything's back to front. The dinner hall smells of actual food. The grumpy secretary is lovely. Mr Krupp, their head teacher, laughs at their jokes and prances off whistling!

Then they spot two boys who look exactly like them. Same faces, swapped haircuts and swapped shirts, and a LOT more wicked. Is there anything more alarming than meeting yourself?

Evil George and Evil Harold have a hypno-ring of their own. Soon their very nice head teacher is a very nasty villain called Captain Blunderpants. Before long the whole gang has followed our heroes home. Even Sulu, the boys' own hamster, has been hypnotised onto the wrong side, and he's about to be zapped up to the size of a building.

Keep an eye on the grandparents at dinner, by the way. That carton on the table matters (and you'll never look at a walking frame the same way again).

It reads like a comic squashed into a chapter book. The chapters are short and there's a picture on almost every page. George and Harold's comics sit inside the story with every spelling wobble left in, and half the fun is spotting them. The jokes are in the pictures too, like a school sign rearranged so the teachers bend over.

The big fights are in Flip-E-Rama. You swipe back and forth between two pages and the drawings move (badly, which is the joke). Lots of children will finish it in one go and then go back for the bits they missed.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The humour is cheeky and very rude about grown-ups. Teachers are drawn as bullies, there's plenty of toilet talk and a running gag about spankings. Back in their real school the children are even made to write mean lines about themselves on the board. It's all played for laughs, but a sensitive child might want a quick chat about it. Most will just giggle. It also stops on a cliffhanger, so have the ninth book handy.

What to read next

If they've jumped in here, go back to where it all started. The Adventures of Captain Underpants is book one, and it's the best place to meet George and Harold properly.