Read The Bad Guys 9 – The Big Bad Wolf free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
The Big Bad Wolf is Aaron Blabey's ninth Bad Guys book, a very loud and very silly comic-style adventure for 7 year olds where Mr Wolf is now the monster.
It drops you straight into the middle of a disaster. Aliens have taken over the world. Wolf has grown to the size of a football stadium and he's stomping round the city throwing buses (in a giant pair of underpants).
The rest of the gang are ready to give up. Without Wolf, Shark says, they're just a bunch of crooks. So it's Mr Snake, of all people, who gives the big speech. They owe it to Wolf to never give up.
Half the team set off to get Legs onto the aliens' mother ship. The other half get a much stranger job. Somebody has to get Snake inside Wolf's ear so he can talk some sense into him. (He's NEVER cleaned it, by the way.)
Nearly every page is pictures and speech bubbles, set out in comic panels. Some pages have no words at all, just a ROOOOAAARR stretched across two of them or a building going BOOM. The words that are there are short and punchy, often in huge capitals. A child who's happy reading on their own can race through it in one go.
The jokes come thick and fast. Shark disguises himself as a unicorn to distract the aliens, and they're totally charmed (for about three seconds). Doom, the grumpiest bird you'll ever meet, turns out to be called Joy. Piranha boasts about beating a T. rex, when everyone knows he just got stuck up its nose.
There's real heart in it too. When the clever plans stop working, Snake has to try just talking to his friend. What he says is rude and funny and then suddenly very sweet. Who knew Mr Snake had it in him?
It's worth knowing that it ends on a TO BE CONTINUED, with things looking very bleak for the gang. A reader who hates being left hanging might grumble!
Nine books in, the jokes work best if you already know who everyone is. If your reader hasn't met the gang yet, go back to the first Bad Guys book and start where it all began, with Wolf, Snake, Shark and Piranha.
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