Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur

Mordecai Richler's Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur is a daft, galloping adventure for 9 year olds about a boy whose little pet lizard turns out to be something much, much bigger.

What happens

Jacob is eight, the youngest of five, and he still says things twice when he's nervous. His family has just moved from England to Montreal. The kids at school laugh at his accent and his big brothers and sisters tease him constantly. (His brother Daniel tells him "denote" means what you write with de pencil and de paper. Guess what Jacob says in class.)

Then his parents come back from a safari in Kenya with a present. It's a small green lizard in a cigar box, and it climbs straight into Jacob's lap. He calls it Dippy.

Dippy eats rubbish and grows at an alarming rate. Within two months he's the size of a horse. By the summer holidays he's as tall as a giraffe, and the neighbours at the lake are not happy.

Enter Professor Wacko Kilowatt, the country's top scientist. He decides Dippy is either a hoax or a figment of Jacob's imagination, and then that he should be bombed anyway. The prime minister, Perry Pleaser, desperately needs to be popular and likes the idea of slaying a dragon.

So Jacob does the only sensible thing. He borrows his dad's poker winnings, packs a frying pan and a tent, and rides Dippy west towards the Rocky Mountains. Soon there are tanks round the family cottage and wanted posters all over Canada. Oh, and it turns out Dippy can talk!

It's the grown-ups who are the joke here. The prime minister has six yes people who agree with everything. The army's intelligence men study his packing list and decide he's possibly somewhere in Canada. And Dippy is the best company, a moaning, pizza-loving dinosaur who can sing a lovely baritone and shatters windows when he hits a high note.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Some of the jokes belong to another age. A bully is called "fat Freddy", a couple drive home drunk from a party, and a snooty club says it lets in members who are "black or Italian or Jewish or Greek" as long as they're rich. That last one is mocking the snobs, but it's the sort of line you might want to talk through.

For a reader who likes their stories silly and a bit rude (Dippy's burps knock down trees), it's a real romp.

What to read next

There's more of Jacob and his very loud family in Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case. This time there's a new neighbour whose card says he's a master spy, and a glaring new headmaster at school.