Attack of the Demon Dinner Ladies

Pamela Butchart's Attack of the Demon Dinner Ladies is a gloriously silly school story for 7 year olds about four friends who are CERTAIN the new head dinner lady is up to no good.

What happens

It's Shepherd's Pie Day, and for once nobody can smell it. That's the first clue. All the dinner ladies are suddenly in new uniforms and fancy hats (Zach thinks they've all gone bald). There are tiny black things floating in the water jug. The menu suddenly says words like QUAIL and TEMPURA.

Izzy tells the story, and she tells it exactly the way a child tells you what happened at school. It all comes out in one breathless rush of "and then" and "that's when", with LOTS of capital letters for the important bits.

Her friends are brilliant. Jodi is the bossy one who knows police words and has a whiteboard for secret meetings. Zach knows about demons from a library book. And Maisie faints when she's scared, which is most of the time.

The lollipop man lets slip that the new head dinner lady worked at the school a long time ago and is "infamous". Nobody knows what for. Then there are seagulls everywhere, a new red-haired girl Izzy isn't sure about, and an avocado that ends with Jodi's mum in an ambulance.

Right from the first page Izzy tells you that Maisie ends up carried off by seagulls. So you know it's coming, and half the fun is waiting to find out how on earth it happens.

The best bit is how completely seriously the four of them take it all. They hold votes. They bag up an avocado as EVIDENCE. Maisie fills in applications for a new school for all four of them before Jodi pulls the plug out of the wall.

It's the logic of the playground, where a strange smell at lunch can only mean one thing. Your reader will probably be laughing at them and completely on their side at the same time.

Who hasn't been sure a dinner lady was out to get them?

What to read next

If this one goes down well, the gang has more school-dinner trouble in The Spy Who Loved School Dinners. This time the danger is a new French girl who actually LIKES the food.