Mascot Madness!

Andy Griffiths' Mascot Madness! is a daft school story for 8 year olds narrated by a boy whose morning begins with a face full of banana milk.

What happens

Henry McThrottle goes to Northwest Southeast Central School. He explains where that is and it does not help at all.

He is in the yard with his mates when the bus from the rival school goes past and somebody throws a carton out of the window. Sweet, sticky, banana-flavoured milk, all over him.

Henry's verdict on himself is that he is fine. Just a bit more banana-milky than usual.

His classmates are the real event here. Newton is frightened of everything, including the word "it", on the grounds that you can never be sure what it is referring to. Fiona gets out her calculator and works out whether a milk carton at that velocity could have killed him. David looks up the rule about throwing missiles from vehicles, in his own school's handbook, which is no use whatsoever.

Penny and Gina want to know whether their horses are all right. The horses are imaginary. They are tethered outside because Mr Brainfright said they had to be, so the girls could get on with their work.

Then Grant Gadget offers to help, because his dad invents things and Grant brings them in.

The Super Dryer 3000 is the size of a hairdryer and has the power of three thousand. It dries Henry out. It also fires him backwards through the classroom window and into the gardener's freshly dug flowerbed, and Mr Spade comes across the grass with a pitchfork.

And when Mr Brainfright finally walks in, he sniffs, beams and announces that there is nothing quite like the smell of fresh banana in the morning.

This is what your reader is getting. Very short chapters. One catastrophe each. A joke roughly every four lines.

It is a good one for a child who runs out of steam in longer books, because every chapter ends with something happening and you can stop after any of them.

Just so you know what it is not. Nobody learns anything. Nobody grows. The pitchfork and the flying through windows are cartoon, in the sense that nobody is ever actually hurt. If your reader wants characters they can care about, this is not that book and does not want to be.

What to read next

Pamela Butchart pulls the same trick in a Scottish primary school. Izzy is completely certain there is a yeti in the playground, her three friends are completely certain too, and every single adult keeps telling them that everything is absolutely fine.