Rotten School 16 – Dumb Clucks

R. L. Stine's Dumb Clucks is a noisy, very daft Rotten School story for 7 year olds, with a boy trying to cash in on a cartoon craze.

What happens

Bernie Bridges has a cart full of T-shirts nobody wants. His friends in Rotten House have gone off the Tweenage Mutant Ninja Tadpoles (too babyish, apparently). Now they sit in front of the telly every night going BLUCK BLUCK BLUCK at a show about a flying chicken in a cape.

Then Headmaster Upchuck puts Bernie in charge of Parents' Day. He has to raise money for the refreshments and keep the whole school calm and quiet until then. If he fails, he's being sent home for good. Calm and quiet? At the Rotten School?

So Bernie tries selling eggs you can supposedly hatch your own chicken hero out of. That ends in an egg fight all over the Commons Room, just as the dorm mother walks in. Next he orders shirts and caps. And he walks straight into a war, because half the school can't stand the chicken and would much rather cheer for a duck.

It's the kind of silly your reader will want to read out loud. A crowd of first graders peck Bernie like a flock of hens. Billy the Brain is heartbroken to find out the chicken is only a cartoon. Bernie tells the whole thing himself, and he's always the hero of his own story, even when he's lying on the floor covered in egg.

This is book sixteen in the series, but Bernie introduces himself right at the start, so it doesn't matter where your reader joins in.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

One of the cartoon fans' chants uses an old insult for disabled people as a throwaway rhyme. It's a single line in a fast, noisy scene. Some families would rather skip it, and it's an easy one to talk about if your reader asks what it means. The rest is burps, eggs and slapstick.

What to read next

If they'd like to see where all the scheming started, go back to The Big Blueberry Barf-Off, the first Rotten School book. Bernie wakes up to breakfast in bed, carried in by his loyal friend Belzer, on the day that leads to the biggest pie battle in the school's history.