For young bookworms, there’s something incredibly comforting about the Jeremy Strong books. The Nick Sharratt illustrations will be familiar to many of us and make for a really easy and enjoyable reading experience.
In my experience, these books feel like a fun younger brother to the Jacqueline Wilson books. And they make excellent family reads too!
We have forty-two of Jeremy Strong’s books, and you’ll find a lot of them on our funny books for 8 year olds shelf. My five are My Brother’s Famous Bottom, Return of the Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog, Krazy Kow Saves the World, Cartoon Kid and There’s a Viking in My Bed.
All five are for 8 year olds. His Pirate School books are for 5 year olds, so they’re at the end.
Which Jeremy Strong book should they read first?
The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog. Trevor’s mum offers him thirty pounds to walk Streaker every day of the Easter holidays, and Streaker goes from nought to gone before you’ve finished saying her name. It’s already on my book series from the 90s list, so I’ve left it out of the five below.
Lost! The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog is the one Streaker tells herself. She calls people two-legs. That one is on my what to read after Roald Dahl list. Our Jeremy Strong page lists every book of his we have.
Most of his books are told by a child talking straight at you. Nicholas complains about nappy duty roughly every other page, and Casper tells you what he very nearly said to the teacher before explaining why he didn’t.
The jokes are mostly bottoms, pants and cowpats.
The best Jeremy Strong books, my five
My Brother’s Famous Bottom
My Brother’s Famous Bottom
The one I’d start with for the family stories. Nicholas’s family has no money. Less than no money, as Dad explains at a special meeting, banging a spoon on the table. His first three ideas are selling the twins, selling Nicholas and selling Granny. His actual Big Plan is a farm in the back garden. Soon there are ten chickens, a cockerel and a goat called Rubbish, who eats Nicholas’s shoelaces and then next door’s wellies.
Granny is sixty-five, married to a Hell’s Angel called Lancelot, and does wheelies. My Mum’s Going to Explode! is the earlier one, from before the twins were born.
Return of the Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog
Return of the Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog
Streaker again, and this time there’s a dog show. Trevor reckons Streaker wasn’t bred so much as built in a Ferrari factory. She has never understood Sit, Stay or Come back. She does come for Walkies now, ever since an exercise bike fired her across the room and wedged her in the washing machine, and the fire brigade had to get her out. Then his friend Tina decides the two of them are entering Streaker in the dog show.
It starts with a bet against the local bully, and Trevor explains it all as he goes. Nothing in it is upsetting.
Krazy Kow Saves the World
Krazy Kow Saves the World – Well, Almost
Great for a reader who’s a bit of a doodler. Jamie’s school has entered an environmental competition, and the prize for the winning idea is a video camera. Everyone else will do a poster. Jamie is going to make a real film. His brother shuts him in the wardrobe, and stuck under it in a heap of coat hangers he invents Krazy Kow. She has four stomachs, she does karate and her udder works as a flame-thrower, a water cannon and a vacuum cleaner. Then the filming starts, and everything that can go wrong does.
Jamie has strong views on football too, mainly that everybody assumes boys like it and he doesn’t.
Cartoon Kid
Cartoon Kid
Three stories in one book, so it’s a great one for a road trip. Casper starts the book by falling off his chair. He decides his new teacher should be called Mr Horrible Hairy Face, and is slightly disappointed when he turns out to be Mr Butternut. Then Mr Butternut sits the class round his armchair, tells them softly that each of them is hiding something enormous, and shouts the answer so loudly they fall over backwards. They’re all superheroes. Casper draws his best friend with enormous feet and invents Big Feet Pete.
Cartoon Kid: Supercharged! is the next one, with a much bigger boy called Masher McNee after them. One thing to flag. The boys make up names for their classmates and a couple are unkind, including a joke about a girl’s weight that the book lets pass.
There’s a Viking in My Bed
There’s a Viking in My Bed and Other Stories
A Viking in a seaside hotel that’s falling to bits. Sigurd is the lookout on the longship, because he can’t row and he can’t cook. In the fog the boat hits rocks, Sigurd goes over the front, and his captain rows off without him. He climbs the cliff and finds a sign with his own face on it, helmet and moustache and all. So obviously it’s his house. It’s The Viking Hotel, and the Ellis family are running it badly.
There’s more than one Sigurd story in this edition. His rusty sword is called Nosepicker. Viking at School and Viking in Trouble carry on from here.
The rest of the Nicholas books
In My Brother’s Famous Bottom Gets Pinched, a tour bus with AS SEEN ON TV down the side parks across next door’s drive. My Brother’s Hot Cross Bottom is thirty eggs in an incubator in the kitchen, for the school Easter Fair.
In My Dad’s Got an Alligator, the alligator is nearly as long as the sofa and Dad insists it is a vegetarian. In My Granny’s Great Escape, Granny has a crush on the biker next door. Nicholas would like to crawl into a hole.
Three for Christmas
My Brother’s Christmas Bottom-Unwrapped! starts five weeks before Christmas, with Dad’s factory closing down. In Christmas Chaos for the Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog, Streaker has three puppies and Trevor wanted to call them Piddle, Tiddle and Widdle. Invasion of the Christmas Puddings opens with millions of puddings gathering at the edge of the universe.
My Christmas books for 8 year olds list has more for the same age.
More from him
The Indoor Pirates are five pirates who can’t stand the sea, living in a terraced house with rope rigging where the stairs used to be. The Karate Princess is about Belinda, the sixteenth daughter of King Stormbelly, and the only one he calls ordinary.
Pandemonium at School has a supply teacher who gets through the whole timetable by half past nine. In Batpants!, the family pet is an orang-utan who puts a pair of Batman pants on her head.
And Pirate School, for 5 year olds
Patagonia Clatterbottom runs the best pirate school in the world. She has an orange wig and one wooden leg, which she chucks at her secretary when she gets cross. Just a Bit of Wind is the first day at school, and we have four more after it.
After Jeremy Strong
My best David Walliams books list is the next one I’d try for an 8 year old who likes a funny book. For a wider choice at the same age, my chapter books for 8 year olds list has five more.
Just so you know…
All forty-two are in Little Reads, a children’s library app with 3,000+ hand-picked books. It’s £7.99 a month after a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.
Little Reads doesn’t teach reading and there’s nothing to pass. If yours already reads and wants the next Streaker book the minute this one’s done, that’s what it’s for.