Pencil of Doom!

Pencil of Doom! by Andy Griffiths is a very silly school story for 8 year olds about a pencil that seems to write things into being true.

What happens

Henry McThrottle goes to Northwest Southeast Central School, which is southeast of a town called Northwest, which is northwest of Central City. You do not need to know where Central City is. It is not important.

He turns up late one morning to find his teacher hanging upside down from a ceiling rafter by his toes, in a purple jacket and an orange shirt, demonstrating how bats sleep.

Mr Brainfright then announces that they are doing magic tricks instead of maths, and asks to borrow a pencil. Henry hands over his. It is green with black stripes, it has a rubber on the end shaped like a skull, and Henry has never liked it because the skull's eyes seem to follow him about.

The vanishing bit works beautifully. Bringing it back does not.

The whole thing is chaos on purpose, and it moves at a sprint. Some chapters run a page. One of them is a single sentence.

The class do most of the work. Fiona McBrain takes notes and wants to know if it will be in the test. Clive Durkin threatens to tell his brother about everything. Newton Hooton is scared of absolutely everything, including being scared, and hangs onto a lucky rabbit's foot. Gretel Armstrong is the strongest girl in the school and is very happy to say so.

One thing you might want to know about first. The teacher goes out of the classroom window in chapter four, choking on pencil dust, and Henry jumps out after him into the flowerbed. It is played purely for laughs and it is about as realistic as a cartoon anvil. But a child who takes a grown up in trouble seriously might not read it that way.

The other thing is that it is proudly, cheerfully daft. Nothing in it is trying to teach anybody anything. A reader who wants events to follow on sensibly from each other will be cross with it inside a chapter.

What to read next

If daft is what they are after, Mascot Madness! throws Henry and the same four friends into a sports carnival against a rival school, and it goes about as well as you would expect.