Dinosaur Pox

Jeremy Strong's Dinosaur Pox is a very silly story for 8 year olds about a girl who goes to bed grumpy and wakes up as a stegosaurus.

What happens

Jodie Bolton is ten and fed up. If she wrote a list of everything she disliked, it would start with her own hair.

She wants long blonde princess hair. She has short dark curls, which she once cut off with her mum's best scissors in the hope that the next lot would grow back different. Then there are the freckles, which have got everywhere. Jodie reckons her face looks like a car windscreen in summer.

Number three on the list is her brother Mark. He is nine, he is already taller than her, and the two of them get on like two scorpions shut in a box.

At tea one night Mark decides that being vegetarian is dangerous. Dinosaurs were vegetarians, he says, and look what happened to them. You're going to become extinct.

Next morning Jodie wakes up with a snout.

What happens after that is the properly funny part. She still has to go to school. Her clothes don't fit, so Mum gets a school tie around her neck. She still has to sit through assembly, where she tries to sing the hymn and it comes out as grunting mixed with a squeaky snarl. The head teacher tells her off for spoiling it, which is not fair at all, and Jodie says so.

Your reader gets the whole day from inside Jodie's head. She is secretly thrilled that for once everyone wants to look at her. She is also still Jodie, still grumpy, still ready with an answer. Asked where she is going to sit, she says on her bottom, like everyone else.

It doesn't stay a school story. A trip to the doctor turns into something much worse, because a consultant called Mr Pinkerton-Snark works out exactly how much money a real live dinosaur is worth.

A small heads-up. There is quite a lot of looks talk in the early chapters. Jodie hates her hair and her freckles, and she and the prettiest girl in the class trade some nasty personal insults about spots. It isn't dwelt on and Jodie is clearly the one we are laughing with, but a child who is currently unhappy about their own face might read those pages harder than the author intended.

What to read next

For another Jeremy Strong hero with a daft plan and absolutely no shame, there's Krazy Kow Saves the World. That one is narrated by a boy who has invented a superhero cow with a flame-thrower in her udder and fully intends to be famous.