Rotten School 15 – Calling All Birdbrains

R. L. Stine's Calling All Birdbrains is a gross-out school comedy for 7 year olds about a boy who's certain his parrot is lucky.

What happens

Bernie Bridges has just won twenty games of Uno in a row, at six in the morning, in a back room nobody's supposed to be in. He knows exactly why. Lippy, the parrot on his shoulder, is lucky.

This is the fifteenth Rotten School book, and Bernie's friends are all here. Feenman and Crench decide they want some of that luck. They both grab Lippy at once and have a tug-of-war with him (feathers everywhere), and poor Lippy ends up with a big bald patch.

From that moment Bernie's luck goes very wrong. He's caught sneaking back to his dorm, marched off for a two-hour lecture and handed a mop. Lippy squawks at the worst possible moment every time. And Jennifer Ecch wants Bernie as her partner for the big I. B. Rotten Games, and she won't take no for an answer.

So the bird has to go. Getting rid of a bad-luck parrot turns out to be much harder than it sounds, especially once the spoiled rich kid Sherman Oaks is involved.

What makes it such fun is Bernie's version of events. He's SO sure of himself. He tells you he's an honest guy (apart from the odd little white lie), then gets straight on with the lying. Your reader will be ahead of him most of the time, which is half the joke.

It's very much a gross-out book. Parrot plop lands on hands and shirts, Beast eats Bernie's lunch and then his shirt, and a whole room of boys ends up sneezing their heads off. The slapstick is cartoonish too. Lippy bites off Belzer's little finger and nobody seems too bothered, so it's one for a child who finds that kind of thing funny rather than upsetting.

You don't need to have read the earlier books. Bernie explains who everyone is as he goes, and he's never short of an opinion about any of them.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Dumb Clucks is the next Rotten School book, and this time it's a cartoon chicken causing the trouble. Bernie's stuck with a cart of T-shirts nobody wants, because the whole dorm has gone Stupid Chicken mad.