My Brother’s Famous Bottom Gets Pinched

My Brother's Famous Bottom Gets Pinched by Jeremy Strong is a daft family story for 8 year olds, told by an eleven year old whose baby brother is more famous than he is.

What happens

Nicholas has twin siblings called Cheese and Tomato. Those are not their names. Dad started it because they were born in the back of a pizza delivery van, and it stuck.

Cheese's bottom has been on television advertising nappies. So one morning a tour bus the size of a small building parks across the neighbour's driveway with AS SEEN ON TV written down the side in sparkly letters.

Mr Dumper, the King of Throwaway Nappies, wants the whole family on a nationwide roadshow. Hotels. A chocolate fountain. A room that slides out of the bus and turns into a stage.

Nicholas is thrilled for roughly four seconds. Then he remembers Rubbish.

Rubbish is the goat. He is the only one who can milk her, and a goat who does not get milked is a problem nobody in that house wants to think about too hard.

His three plans for fixing it are a milking machine, a robot and a goat sitter. He works through all three with total seriousness and all three fall over. You cannot look up GOAT in Yellow Pages. The nearest thing is GO-KARTS.

That is the engine of the book. Nicholas is the only sensible person in a family of lunatics, and he narrates the lot quite patiently, like a man doing his best.

Dad is the best thing in it. He answers the front door claiming his real name is Peter Pinkie Plumpot. He winds up the next door neighbour Mr Tugg about his beloved lawn until Mr Tugg is hopping about like a frog in a frying pan.

Mum deals with both of them. There is an entire conversation about whether bottoms are important, which she loses.

Your reader will almost certainly think poo is the funniest word in English. Tomato agrees. It is roughly the only word she knows and she deploys it about once a page.

Oh, and one bit you might want to know about. At the first hotel the family open a bottle of champagne and Nicholas is given half a glass, which he rather likes. It is a passing line rather than a scene, but it is there.

Cheese was already famous before this book started, so your reader is walking in partway through the family's run of luck. It does not matter. Everything you need is explained in the first chapter.

What to read next

If the goat is the bit that lands, My Brother's Famous Bottom Goes Camping has Dad deciding they should all go camping, with the twins a good bit older, a hen smuggled into the camping van and a pet carrot in Barbie clothes.