Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets

Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets is a gloriously daft school adventure for 7 year olds, where two boys fill their school with hungry toilets by mistake.

What happens

This is the second Captain Underpants book. You don't need the first one, though. A little comic by George and Harold at the start explains how their grumpy head teacher, Mr Krupp, turns into a superhero in his pants whenever somebody snaps their fingers.

This time it's the school Invention Convention. First prize is being Principal for the Day, and Mr Krupp has banned the boys from going (after last year's glue on every chair, can you blame him?).

So they sneak in the evening before and fiddle with everybody else's inventions. The dog-washer sprays ink and the ping-pong machine fires eggs. It all goes horribly well, until Melvin, the school brainiac, tells on them.

In detention they draw a new comic about talking toilets. Then they sneak out to copy it on Melvin's machine, which turns out to bring pictures to life. Out climbs toilet after toilet, all teeth, chanting YUM, YUM, EAT 'EM UP!

A teacher snaps her fingers in a panic, Mr Krupp grins a very silly grin, and off goes Captain Underpants in a red curtain, armed with a slingshot made of pants.

It's not quite a comic and not quite a chapter book. The chapters are very short (one is a single sentence), the print is big and there's a drawing on every page. The boys' own comic sits in the middle, spelling mistakes and all. The big fights are in Flip-E-Rama, two pictures you swipe between to make them move, and the book explains how on a screen. It's easy to finish in one sitting.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The teachers are all horrible, the boys wreck their classmates' inventions and the book is firmly on their side. The jokes are toilets, sick and underpants throughout. The toilets swallow the teachers whole, but every one comes back out without a scratch. The two Extremely Graphic Violence chapters are a joke too. It's a man in his pants wrestling a giant toilet.

If your reader thinks the word toilet is funny all on its own, this is probably their dream book.

What to read next

For more friends making their own superhero comics, try It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Toiletman. Chris is racing to finish his Toiletman comic for the local shop, and his friends George (a different George, with a magic burp) and Alex aren't sure they like how they turn up in it.