Read Katie Kazoo Switcheroo – Drat! You Copycat! free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Nancy Krulik's Drat! You Copycat! is a Katie Kazoo Switcheroo story for 7 year olds, and this time the magic wind picks someone very awkward.
Class 3A has somebody new in it. Becky Stern has moved up from Atlanta, she's wearing a dress, and she looks terrified.
Katie puts her hand up to be Becky's buddy for the week.
Within about ten seconds a folded note lands on her desk. It's from Suzanne, it's about Becky, and it isn't kind.
That's the shape of the whole book, and it's a shape most children will know. Katie is stuck between a best friend who says mean things without thinking and a new girl who is trying so hard it makes everything worse. Becky copies Suzanne's answer in vocabulary. Then her outfit. Then her project topic.
Suzanne is beside herself. Katie is trying to be loyal to two people at once and getting nowhere.
Which is when the magic wind arrives.
If you're new to these, the wind only ever blows around Katie, only when she's on her own, and it turns her into somebody else. It started after the worst day of her life, when she lost the football match, ruined her jeans in the mud and burped in front of the entire class. She wished she could be anyone but herself, and something was apparently listening.
This time it makes her Becky. Which means she gets to hear exactly what everyone says about Becky when Becky isn't in the room.
It's twelve very short chapters and it moves. Most of it is talking, and the talk is the good bit. George mixes spaghetti into his chocolate pudding and waits for someone to dare him. Kevin is eating his way towards a tomato world record and has passed two hundred and thirty-seven this month. Suzanne will talk about Cleopatra until people finish her sentences for her.
Nothing in it is upsetting. The meanness is the everyday classroom sort, note-passing and eye-rolling and being left out of a game, and it's all out in the open where you can talk about it. If your child is at the age where friendships are suddenly complicated and nobody is quite sure who is allowed to play with whom, they'll recognise every page.
If that goes down well, Doggone It! is the one where Katie's teacher moves in next door, decides she doesn't like dogs running about off the lead, and Katie ends up inside her own cocker spaniel.
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
7-day free trial. Then £7.99/month.
