Day of the Bizarros!

Benjamin Bird's Day of the Bizarros is a super-short superhero story for 6 year olds in which Superman's backwards twin makes everything go wrong.

What happens

Batman is away, so Superman is looking after Gotham City. His dog Krypto flies along beside him. The Joker is safely locked up in prison, so it should be a quiet night.

It isn't. Far away on Bizarro World, a square planet where everything is the opposite of Earth, Superman's double has decided to help. Bizarro and his not-so-loyal dog, Bizarro Krypto, want to "wrong his rights".

That means crash-landing their spaceship straight into the prison. The Joker escapes, and he's delighted to give his new backwards friends a lift.

Bizarro's way of talking is the best bit. "Me land perfectly terrible!" he beams after the crash. He wants to turn "ugly new buildings into beautiful ruins". Your reader will probably love spotting what he's got the wrong way round. It's also a great one for reading aloud in a silly voice (go on, you know you want to).

There's plenty of action packed into three tiny chapters. The Jokermobile punches a hole in a bank with a giant boxing glove. Krypto freezes a gang of crooks solid with his freeze breath. And Bizarro gets properly grumpy when the crowds cheer for Superman instead of him.

So how do you stop someone who does everything backwards? Superman works it out, and the answer is really clever. It's the kind of twist a six-year-old will be very pleased to have understood. We won't give it away here!

It's a quick read, and just right for someone taking their first steps into chapter books on their own. There are big sound words like WHOOSH! and KA-BLAM! to shout out loud. At the back there's a little glossary explaining words such as "vault" and "villain".

If your reader is superhero-mad, it's an easy win. And Batman even turns up at the very end, just in time to hear how the day went.

What to read next

If the dogs and the freeze breath went down well, Supergirl's Pet Problem is another Superman story with an animal causing chaos. Supergirl rescues a sweet little furry creature from the traffic, and it turns out to be a much BIGGER problem than anyone expected.