Judy Moody and the Right Royal Tea Party

Megan McDonald's Judy Moody and the Right Royal Tea Party is a funny family story for 7 year olds about a girl who decides she is related to the Queen.

What happens

It starts with a family tree for school. Grandma Lou turns up with a box of old photographs and charts, and out comes the news. Grandpa Jack traced the Moodys back thirteen generations, and somewhere in there is a cousin who is supposed to have rescued a prisoner from the Tower of London.

Judy falls off her chair. Royal blood!

Within moments she has her purple bathrobe over her shoulders as a cape, a cardboard crown from the pizza place, a candy necklace standing in for pearls and a streak of purple hairspray. Her cat gets a purple cushion and the title of Royal Mouse Catcher.

Then she sits at the kitchen table and opens negotiations. Two birthdays, like the Queen. A nanny along the lines of Mary Poppins. Fireworks, a bouncy castle and possibly a cannon. Failing all that, jam pennies.

Her parents say no to the cannon.

For a British family this is a real treat, because the running joke is that Judy is enormously enthusiastic about Britain and keeps getting it slightly sideways. She calls it the Drooping of the Colour. She flies a flag on her bedroom door so her brother knows when she's in. She gets her British words from Tori, her pen pal in London, and then discovers to her horror that Jessica Finch knows them too.

Stink is excellent throughout. He counters the whole royal business with the observation that queens got their heads chopped off, then reappears in an eye patch as a pirate ancestor, and later stands guard in a top hat outside a tent, giggling.

Being inside Judy's head is the fun of it. She is all in, all the time, and she narrates her own life like it's an event. When Grandma Lou hands over an old peacock brooch, it isn't costume jewellery. It's the crown jewel of the Royal House of Moody, and it needs a pillow and a guard.

There's almost nothing here to flag. An ancestor died on the Titanic after helping people into lifeboats, and it's mentioned in a couple of lines. Stink's beheading joke is a joke.

This one sits well into the series. It opens by listing everything Judy has been before, and several of those are earlier books. It reads perfectly happily on its own.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who likes the sound of the crown jewels, The Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Treasure Hunt sends Judy and Stink to an island with a spyglass, a pirate rule book and actual silver coins hidden about the place.