Cartoon Kid

Jeremy Strong's Cartoon Kid is a funny school story for 8 year olds about a class who are told, on the first day of term, that they are all secretly superheroes.

What happens

Casper Jenkinson starts the book by falling off his chair. His new teacher has asked him a question, his brain has made the noise it makes when it cannot think, and everybody laughs.

He decides the teacher shall be called Mr Horrible Hairy Face. The man turns out to be Mr Butternut, which Casper finds mildly disappointing.

Then Mr Butternut gets everyone to sit on the floor around his armchair, leans right in, tells them softly that each of them is hiding something enormous, and shouts the answer so loudly they fall over backwards.

After that the class set about naming themselves. Casper draws his best friend with enormous feet and a huge nose and invents Big Feet Pete. Noella, who moans about everything, becomes the Incredible Sulk. It is exactly the game children play anyway, given official permission.

Casper's voice is the whole appeal here. He is short and ginger with knobbly knees and is completely convinced he is no good at anything except drawing. He tells you what he very nearly said to the teacher and then why he did not. He notices that Mia smells of soap and deduces that she must have one of those mums.

There are three stories in here rather than one long one, so it is easy to stop at a good place. One of them involves a birthday cake, an electric mixer on the highest setting and a kitchen with cake mixture up the walls and across the ceiling.

The humour is broad and a bit rude. Bottoms, pants, sniggering about knickers, all of that.

One thing I would flag. The boys spend a while inventing names for their classmates and a couple of them are unkind. Pete argues that a girl in the class cannot be a superhero because she is fat and her bottom sticks out, and the two of them laugh about it, and the book does not pause to say that was a horrible thing to say. Depending on your child, that is either invisible playground noise or a sentence you will want to have with them.

Everything else is warm. Mr Butternut is a lovely teacher who says out loud that nobody is good at everything.

If you've got a reader who likes a narrator talking straight at them, with drawings and capital letters all over the page, this is very much their sort of book, and it is short enough not to put anyone off.

What to read next

There is more Casper in Supercharged!, which lands a monstrous new teacher on the class and sets a much bigger boy called Masher McNee after them.