Guinea Pigs Online 4 – Christmas Quest

Jennifer Gray and Amanda Swift's Christmas Quest is a very silly festive adventure for 8 year olds, and the fourth book in the Guinea Pigs Online series.

What happens

It's three days before Christmas at number 7, Middleton Crescent. Fuzzy is trying to hold up a Christmas tree made out of broccoli. Coco is lying on the straw listing the presents she'd like (a purple hairbrush, obviously, even though she's got about five already).

Then their friend Eduardo drops by on his scooter with a story from home. In Peru his family keep a lucky Christmas Cocoa Bean on the table every year. Without it, the legend goes, a giant condor will eat every guinea pig in the mountains.

Coco says it's rubbish. Eduardo scoots off in tears. And Coco feels awful, because she knows she only said it because he was getting all the attention.

What happens next is gloriously daft. Coco hides in the handbag of Henrietta's mum, an Antarctic explorer everyone calls Mummy, who cools off by standing in the fridge. Mummy takes a phone call about the lost gold of Magchu Pigchu and jumps straight into a taxi to the airport. Before long the whole household is flying to Peru, with Eduardo hidden in the dog's pet carrier. When they get there, the cocoa bean has vanished.

The fun of reading it is how much the guinea pigs get up to behind the humans' backs. They let themselves out of the hutch. They send texts from Mummy's phone. Eduardo's English is wonderfully wonky (the condor has a beak like a pair of "skissors"). And there's a mountain guide who falls asleep whenever there's something he doesn't want to do, which is quite a lot.

Coco is bossy and vain and very funny, but she's also a bit sorry for herself, which makes her easy to like. Who hasn't said something mean when someone else was getting all the attention? She does feel bad about it, and the whole trip is really about her making it up to Eduardo.

For a child who loves animals with big personalities, secret lives and completely ridiculous plans, this is a lovely one to read in the run-up to Christmas. There's peril (a condor with a laptop!) but it's played for laughs all the way.

What to read next

If this is the first one they've found, the very first Guinea Pigs Online book is in the library too. That's where Fuzzy, who dreams of being a TV chef, and Coco, who swears she used to live at Buckingham Palace, first take over the kitchen.