Attack of the Fluffy Bunnies

Andrea Beaty's Attack of the Fluffy Bunnies is a gloriously daft alien-invasion comedy for 8 year olds where the aliens are enormous rabbits with fangs.

What happens

It opens with a meteor going through space. Then the narrator leans in and says remember this, it's important later.

That is the whole tone, really. Somebody is telling your reader this story out loud and keeps stopping to check they are keeping up.

The rabbits are Fierce, Large, Ugly and Ferocious Furballs. Fluffs for short, and there is nothing short about them. Floppy ears for slapping. Enormous feet for stomping. Eyes that spin in opposite directions to hypnotise whatever they are about to eat. The book gives you a proper illustrated table comparing them with the rabbits you get on Earth, then summarises it for anyone who skipped it. FLUFFS = BAD.

Down on our planet, Joules and Kevin Rockman are being dropped at Camp Whatsitooya. The sign is unreadable and covered in moss. Dad says it isn't cruddy, it's rustic, because that's what the brochure said.

Their parents are off to a SPAM cookery competition, which they won last year and intend to win again. Then Mum says the fatal words. What could possibly go wrong?

Joules and Kevin know exactly what that means. They have been left to their own devices for years while their parents invented SPAM puddings, and they have watched a truly enormous number of late-night monster films. Kevin even keeps a chart of Famous Last Words.

He charts everything, in fact. Joules doesn't. Joules would rather poke a situation with a stick and see what it does. Between the two of them they are far better prepared for a rabbit invasion than anybody else at that camp.

It is a proper giggle to read, and a good one for a child who likes jokes on the page as well as in the sentences. Footnotes. Tables. A page where the narrator sings la la la for an entire paragraph while you catch up. If your reader hoovers up silly books and then complains they were too short, this is the right kind of daft.

Do know that the humour is happily disgusting and the Fluffs really do eat people, in the way cartoon monsters do. It is all played for laughs and nobody is asked to take it seriously. It is also very American, with SPAM and summer camp and temperatures in Fahrenheit, which is part of the joke rather than a problem.

What to read next

Same twins, worse rabbits. The Schnoz of Doom moves the whole thing to their school and swaps the giant Fluffs for smaller relatives with truly monstrous noses.