Butt Wars! The Final Conflict

Andy Griffiths' Butt Wars! The Final Conflict is a very silly adventure for 8 year olds, and it opens with a boy being flattened by a giant brown blob.

What happens

That's chapter one. All of chapter one.

Zack Freeman has just got home from saving the world and has graduated from the Bum-fighting Academy that morning. He's holding his certificate in one hand and a medal of excellence in the other. Then the blob lands on him, his parents, his instructors and fifty of the best bum-fighting recruits on the planet.

Chapter two is called Blobbified.

Stuck inside it, unable to tell up from down, Zack starts worrying about being fossilised. About being dug up one day, cracked open and put in a museum case for schoolchildren to point at and shout about the disgusting blob-boy.

Then he remembers he's still holding a piece of paper. And that his grandad, one of the very first bum-fighters, was known as the Wiper.

So he wipes.

You probably already know whether this book is for your reader.

It does not let up. There's a scripture called The Book of Bumageddon. There's a scholarly work published by Smellbourne University Press. There are four Great White Bums who all arrive at once and immediately start arguing about which of them is the greatest, until Eleanor loses her patience and tells them to shut up.

The jokes land because the book plays it dead straight. Nobody winks at you. Zack is in real danger, the fights are proper fights, and the fact that the enemy is a bottom gets treated as a sober tactical problem.

It's the sort of book that gets read aloud to you whether you asked for it or not. If that's a price you're willing to pay, it does the job extremely well.

And if toilet humour is a hard no in your house, nothing in here will change your mind. It isn't seasoning. It's the whole meal.

One note on the title. The cover says Butt. The text inside says bum, and so does everything built out of it, from Bumageddon to the Bum-fighting Academy. Your reader won't care, but it may confuse a search.

And it isn't the first one. It starts immediately after Zack has rescued his parents from Uranus and seen off a zombie bum invasion, and it assumes you were there.

What to read next

So if the blob is a hit, go back a step to Zombie Bums from Uranus, which opens with Zack skiing cheerfully down a mountain with absolutely no idea what a crapalanche is.