My Weird School 7 – Mrs. Cooney Is Loony!

Dan Gutman's Mrs. Cooney Is Loony is a silly school mystery for 8 year olds about a boy who falls head over heels for the school nurse.

What happens

In book seven of My Weird School, A.J. fakes being ill to get out of maths. He's also secretly desperate to see Mrs. Cooney, who he thinks is the most beautiful lady ever. By the end of his visit he's decided to marry her when he grows up. There's just one problem (well, two). She's already married, and Ryan and Michael have fallen for her too.

Her cures are very odd. A.J. has to balance a yardstick on his nose, hop on one foot and cluck like a chicken. Ryan has to bounce a balloon on his head and sing the alphabet backwards. Is she even a real nurse?

Andrea has a theory. Mrs. Cooney is a spy! So the gang starts gathering evidence, and it's all super serious (a locked cupboard, a whispered phone call and a thermometer that might secretly be a brain scanner).

A lot of the laughs come from A.J. mishearing things. Head lice turn into headlights. A question about his last bowel movement turns into a list of vowels. Your reader will probably get each joke before A.J. does, which is half the fun.

There's a proper brave moment in there too, when a lunchtime goes wrong and A.J. is the one who remembers what to do. If you've got a reader who loves a detective game (stakeouts, evidence and secret meetings by the monkey bars), they'll be right at home.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

To catch the "spy" in the act, A.J. fibs to his mum so he can go back to school after dark, and the gang hide in the bushes under the nurse's window. It's all played for laughs and the worst of it is a grazed elbow and a plaster. A child who likes to copy might need a reminder that it's a story.

What to read next

If they enjoyed the spy hunt, Mrs. Roopy Is Loopy puts the same gang on the case of a new librarian who may or may not be George Washington.