My Weird School Special: It’s Halloween, I’m turning green!

My Weird School Special: It's Halloween, I'm turning green! by Dan Gutman is a fast, silly story for 8 year olds narrated by a boy whose whole personality is wanting sweets.

What happens

A.J. hates the thirtieth of October. There are giant bags of sweets all over the house and his mum will not let him near them, because they are for the trick or treaters.

Tomorrow isn't now, is his position on this, and honestly he has a point.

It is also Mischief Night, so he looks out of the front window and finds the trees covered in toilet paper. He knows exactly who did it. Andrea Young, the girl in his class who calls him Arlo because she knows he hates it.

So he takes a bar of soap and sets off to do her windows, gets caught standing outside her house holding the soap, and claims he was bird watching.

Ryan backs him up by identifying a yellow bellied sapsucker in a nearby tree. It does not work.

The narration is the whole appeal. A.J. talks straight at you, wanders off the point, announces the rules of being a kid, and refuses to tell you things right before telling you them.

The gang's costume rule is that you have to combine two things. So you get Darth Bambi, a skateboarding hippie dinosaur, and one boy who turns up in his underwear insisting he is the under werewolf.

Michael plans the route on Google Maps for maximum sweets. Then a man answers his door with nothing to give them and asks what their trick is, and none of them have one.

This is American all the way through. Candy, not sweets. Mom, not mum. Trick or treating that cannot legally start before four o'clock. Nothing your reader cannot follow, but they will be reading it in an American accent by chapter three.

If long paragraphs put your child off, this is built for them. The chapters are tiny, there is a joke every few lines, and the footnotes exist mainly to be rude about somebody.

Two chapters in, toilet papering a house and soaping someone's windows are both treated as ordinary fun, and nobody gets told off for either. Fine for most children. If yours is a copier, you will want to say something.

What to read next

A.J. and the same gang take on Presidents' Day in My Weird School Special: We're Red, Weird, and Blue! What Can We Do?, which opens with a whole school electing a pet ferret as its president.