Captain Underpants and the Revolting Revenge of the Radioactive Robo-Boxers

Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants and the Revolting Revenge of the Radioactive Robo-Boxers is a time-travelling comedy for 7 year olds with far more villains called Tippy than anyone needs.

What happens

This is the tenth Captain Underpants book and it carries straight on from the ninth. A comic by George and Harold at the start catches your reader up (spelling mistakes and all). Their enemy, Tippy Tinkletrousers, made a very big mess of history last time.

Now he's trying to fix it, which involves shrinking another copy of himself to pocket size. Before long there are three Tippys, and none of them trust each other.

The boys, meanwhile, are on the run. They hop into their Purple Potty time machine to take Crackers, their pet pterodactyl, home to the dinosaur age. Mr Krupp, their grumpy head teacher, comes along by accident. Handy, because one snap of the fingers turns him into Captain Underpants.

The best bit is the Stone Age. The cavepeople can't understand the boys, so George and Harold draw them a comic on the cave wall. There are no words in it at all, just two cave kids saving a little dinosaur from a bully in robot trousers. Your reader gets to read it too.

Around that it's big print, short chapters and a drawing on nearly every page, with a narrator chatting to your reader. Two chapters are in Flip-E-Rama, where you swipe between two pictures to make a fight move.

It's all VERY silly. Chapter titles promise to explain what REALLY killed the dinosaurs and what REALLY caused the Ice Age. Who knew it was all Tippy's fault? There's a sweet side too. With the ice closing in, George refuses to leave Mr Krupp behind. At one point the boys even promise to give up jokes and comics for good. Do they stick to it? That would be telling.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The toilet humour never stops (one villain's tar-covered robot bottom catches fire). Bombs go off, played for laughs, and there's some name-calling. Two chapters are called The Incredibly Graphic Violence Chapter, but that's the joke. One is two superheroes in their pants pulling a giant's nose hairs. It also ends on a cliffhanger, so be ready for "but what happens next?"

New to George and Harold? Don't start here. Begin with the Attack of the Talking Toilets, the earliest of their adventures in the library.

What to read next

If the cave comic is the bit they love, try The 65-Storey Treehouse. Andy and Terry make their own books too (Andy writes, Terry draws). Their wheelie-bin time machine takes them back to a big-nosed dinosaur and some very bored cave people who've never heard of drawing.