My Brother’s Famous Bottom Goes Camping

Jeremy Strong's My Brother's Famous Bottom Goes Camping is a very silly family story for 8 year olds, told by the only person in the house with any sense.

What happens

That's Nicholas. His three year old sister answers to Tomato and his brother to Cheese, because the twins were born in the back of a pizza delivery van and Dad thought that was hilarious.

Tomato's favourite doll is a forked carrot in Barbie clothes. It's called Cecily Sprout. She takes it to breakfast.

Out the back there's a goat called Rubbish, a tortoise Dad insists is the garden's security guard, and four hens who have yet to produce a single egg.

Nicholas walks you round the whole lot like a tour guide, so if your reader has never met this family before they'll be fine starting here.

Then a fox comes sniffing round the hens in the night.

Dad's plan is to guard them himself by sleeping in the twins' play-tent, which is roughly the size of Dad's middle. He gets in it. Sort of. His head sticks out one end and his feet out the other.

What happens next involves the neighbour's burglar searchlights, a water pistol, a whistle and two grown men wrestling in the mud in their nightclothes while their wives try to separate them.

And that disaster is what gives Dad his next idea. The next idea is camping. All of them. Plus the animals.

The jokes are mostly the daft-parent sort. Dad reckoning foxes hate water because they're a bit like cats. Mum inspecting the bruise he says is the size of a melon and pronouncing it more grape-sized. Tomato telling him off for brokening the tent, and Dad correcting her grammar while she lists his crimes.

Nicholas is what makes it land. He loves them all and he sees them exactly as they are. He's forever being sent to fetch a twin out of the hen house, and he tells you about it like you're a mate he's had to explain his family to before.

There are a great many bottoms in this book and one hen called Poop. If that gets a groan rather than a giggle in your house, this one won't change anybody's mind.

What to read next

Got the measure of this family already? Trevor tells it the same way in The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog, straight to you and slightly exasperated. He's been bribed to walk a dog who can go from nought to a hundred in a blink, and he's got the whole Easter holiday to get her under control.