My Weird School 18 – Mrs. Yonkers Is Bonkers!

Dan Gutman's Mrs. Yonkers Is Bonkers is a very silly school story for 8 year olds about a boy whose school has just banned sweets.

What happens

It's the eighteenth My Weird School book, and Ella Mentry School is being dragged into the 21st century. That means a new computer lab in a trailer at the back of the car park. It also means a new computer teacher.

Mrs. Yonkers wears a big foam cheese on her head and a T-shirt that says NERDS R COOL. She's an inventor too. There's a giant hamster wheel that powers the computer (poor Emily ends up spinning round in it upside down) and a turtle called Speedy with a tiny camera on his back.

She's always "ironing out the bugs" and the inventions keep going wrong. Who wouldn't want a remote control pencil sharpener? Well, maybe not after this one goes BAM.

Meanwhile the school nurse has a plan of her own. The fizzy drink and sweet machines are wheeled out of the lunchroom (which A.J. calls the vomitorium), and A.J. is heartbroken. He holds a moment of silence for junk food. He eats an old fluff-covered sweet he finds in his back pocket. He even tries smuggling gummy bears into school in his underwear!

Then he finds out who built the junk food detector by the front door. So is Mrs. Yonkers a genius, or is she completely bonkers?

A.J. tells you the whole thing himself and he's very sure of his facts (green food is the colour of bogeys, so you shouldn't eat it). He even leaves footnotes telling you off for looking down at them. Lots of chapters end on a "you'll never believe" that makes it super hard to stop.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

A.J. is pretty rude about the girls in his class, and he makes fun of Emily when she gets hurt. There's also a security guard with a gun and handcuffs who shouts "Freeze, dirtbag!" over a pocketful of popcorn. It's all very cartoonish, but a reader who takes insults to heart might want a little chat about it.

It's very American, so sweets are candy and fizzy drinks are soda pop. Most readers pick that up in no time.

If you've got a reader who'd happily live on chocolate and thinks vegetables are a crime, A.J. is their kind of hero.

What to read next

If they loved A.J. refusing to eat anything that grows out of the dirt, Pizza, Peanut Butter, and Pickles has him and Andrea arguing over real food facts. He's trying to skip the vegetables from the very first page.