Batpants!

Batpants! by Jeremy Strong is a daft and very happy story for 8 year olds, told by a girl whose family pet is an orang-utan.

What happens

Tilly is ten. She lives in a tree house her dad built, joined to the real house by a wobbly walkway and a rope you can slide down.

Her dad trains animals for films. He brought the orang-utan back from Borneo as an orphaned baby and the whole family fell for her straight away.

Naming her took a while. Gingernut, Mabel and Hairybum all got suggested. Dad's offering was Lady Henrietta Withering Gas-Trumpett.

She got her name the day Tilly's little brother dressed her up as Batman. The ape took one look at the pants, put them on her head instead, and tore round the house hooting with one eye peering out of a leg hole.

Her big brother took one look and said she was more like Batpants. That was that.

She's brilliant company. She's very keen on roast chicken. She's just as keen on apple crumble. Small tomatoes she doesn't eat at all. She loads those into her mouth and fires them out like a machine gun, which is why the kitchen wall has an interesting pippy pattern on it.

Tilly is very good on her family. Zak is thirteen, dresses entirely in black and has a band called The Non-Organic Vegetables. Tilly likes to be at one with nature so she paints her face in leaf colours and sticks feathers in her hair. Zak says she looks like an escaped bush. She tells him he's a Major Hair Accident.

Mum is the reason for the plot. She's a stuntwoman. When a film star has to go over a waterfall in a canoe or fight six karate penguins, Mum puts on the wig and does it instead.

Now she's filming a Colorado Kate picture over here for once, so the whole lot of them are coming along to the location. Batpants has a part. Tilly does not, which she takes very well. (She does not take it well at all.)

Two small things to mention. There are a lot of pants and bottom jokes, starting with the name and carrying on from there, so if that's not welcome in your house this isn't the book. Most 8 year olds will think it's the funniest thing going.

There's also a short bit where some children at school tease Tilly because her dad is Turkish. It lasts about half a page. She points out that everyone comes from somewhere, asks the ringleader where her dad is from, and the answer stops the teasing dead. It's handled lightly and it's over quickly, but it's there.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog is by the same author. Trevor has been bribed thirty pounds to walk a dog with no brakes, and his first bright idea involves roller skates.