Doctor Bonkers

Jeremy Strong's Doctor Bonkers is a daft, noisy time-hopping comedy for 8 year olds that starts with a pillow fight and ends up in front of a Viking army.

What happens

It opens with war in Rosie's bedroom. Rosie and Dylan are nine and twins, and today they hate each other, because she snaffled his PlayStation while he was on Level Three and had gone to the loo.

Six-year-old Alfie is the third army. He's wearing plastic Roman armour and a headdress, and shooting everyone with Utter Death Laser Rays. He kills the curtains three times.

Then Mum arrives and raises her Finger of Warning, which is more powerful than any space-gun known to Humans, Aliens or Alfie, and everyone goes to bed.

There's a note tucked inside the sleeve of the new pyjamas Rosie is wearing. These are Cosmic Pyjamas, it says, and some people think you shouldn't wear the top and the bottom at the same time. Beware.

Dylan says that's ridiculous. Who wears half a pair of pyjamas?

The pyjamas are covered in tiny pictures of buildings and mountains and animals, and then one of them starts moving. It's a little cloud on Rosie's left knee, puffing out a mini cloud and shrinking again. The children lean in to look. So does Bandit the enormous ginger cat, who is nosy about absolutely everything, and who puts one paw straight on it.

They land in a desert with a Viking army thundering at them from one side and ancient Egyptians coming from the other. The Vikings are driving Second World War tanks. The Egyptians are in chariots pulled by dinosaurs.

History has come unstuck, and somebody has stolen the machine that did it.

The fun of reading it is how loud it is on the page. Every crash gets its own line in capitals. KERRANNGG-FUDD-DIDDLYSPING-ZZZUTT. The narrator keeps butting in with something extra in brackets. The cat is treated as a full character, all bottom and opinions.

It's silly on purpose and it never slows down, which makes it a good one for a child who likes a book to be loud, or for reading a chapter aloud at bedtime and doing the noises. There's plenty of fighting but it's entirely cartoonish, with no more harm in it than a pillow fight.

What to read next

If they enjoy an absurd chase through time, they might also like Fortunately, The Milk. That one starts with two children who have no milk for their cereal, and a dad who goes to the corner shop and comes back with an explanation involving a silver disc.