Read George Brown, Class Clown 17 – It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Toiletman! free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Nancy Krulik's It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Toiletman is the seventeenth George Brown, Class Clown book, a funny story for 6 year olds about a comic that nearly ends a friendship.
It's a snow day in Beaver Brook. George and his friend Alex are making a fortune shovelling everyone's paths. Their friend Chris isn't coming, though. He's racing to finish his Toiletman comic, because the local comic shop has promised to print it and sell it!
Then there's the burp. George made a wish on a shooting star once, and only half of it came true. Now a magic super burp bubbles up at the worst moments and takes over his arms and legs. You hear it coming (bing-bong, ping-pong). Then it's snowballs flying everywhere, one of them straight onto his mum's head.
Children will love all of that. But the heart of this one is Chris.
The two of them are so busy with their money and their pizza that Chris keeps getting left out. Then class show-off Louie grabs Chris's sketchbook. There's George in the rough draft, as Gassy George with an ENORMOUS bottom. Alex is an evil genius who's nothing but a giant head. Everyone laughs, and George and Alex storm off, furious.
Who hasn't been cross with a friend over something that was probably meant to be funny? They decide to skip Chris's big launch party and go to a scary-movie marathon instead. The burp has other ideas (it involves a popcorn machine and George going in head first).
It's a very easy story to read and a very easy one to laugh at. But it also gets something right about falling out. Once they've stopped being cross, George and Alex start to notice what they did too. Bragging about their shovelling money. Heading off for pizza when Chris was broke.
There's lots of silly stuff on the side as well. Sage is using a paper fortune-teller to work out who her special guy is, and George is VERY relieved when it lands on the letter M.
If you've got a reader who loves a toilet joke and a bit of chaos, they'll be very happy here. And they might come away thinking about how their own friends feel.
If they want more of George, Trouble Magnet is an earlier George Brown book in the library. George is trying hard to be the new, well-behaved kid in fourth grade, which gets very difficult when his teacher does a hula dance in the gym.
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