Guinea Pigs Online 3 – Viking Victory

Jennifer Gray's Viking Victory is a Guinea Pigs Online adventure for 8 year olds about a gang of guinea pigs taking on a man with a digger.

What happens

A builder has turned up in the thicket at the bottom of Fuzzy and Coco's garden. He wants to flatten it and squeeze in six houses. That's bad news for everyone, and especially Eduardo, who lives in a burrow there.

Everybody has a plan. Terry starts a blog. Eduardo writes a protest song. Coco wants everyone to stop arguing and get a move on (while making sure somebody notices her new pink bow).

Then things get very silly indeed. A muddy guinea pig in a horned helmet pops out from behind a mud hill. He says he's Olaf the Ever-Ready, a Viking from the year 892. He also has a longship with ice-cream-spoon oars.

What follows is the Battle of the Thicket. There's armour made from a baked-bean tin, a hail of banana skins and a remote control that's supposed to work the longship. Terry swears he can make any remote control work anything.

It's a later book in the series, so the gang already know each other and Renard the fox. He even tries to join the protest online, calling himself a rare big-eared, bushy-tailed guinea pig. Who's going to fall for that?

There's plenty of toilet humour (the builder burps sausage sandwich all over the place) and lots of slapstick. It's a quick, cheerful read with short chapters.

Coco is at her funniest when she's jealous. A new girl called Sunbeam thinks Eduardo is brilliant, and Coco is NOT pleased. Anyone who has ever felt a bit left out of a friendship will recognise the feeling (Coco handles it very badly, which is half the fun).

There's a page of online safety tips from Coco and Fuzzy at the end too. It's a nice extra for a reader who's just starting to use the internet.

What to read next

If you're starting from scratch, the first Guinea Pigs Online book is where it all begins. Fuzzy reads a TV chef's newspaper advert and gets it VERY wrong.