Roxie and the Hooligans

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Roxie and the Hooligans is a comic adventure for 8 year olds about a girl who has memorised a survival manual and is still frightened of four children.

What happens

Roxie Warbler is nine. Her uncle is called Dangerfoot, he has wrestled alligators, and he carries a cane that turns into a harpoon or an umbrella depending on the weather.

He travels with Lord Thistlebottom, who wrote the book Roxie knows almost by heart. Lord Thistlebottom's Book of Pitfalls and How to Survive Them. Every entry ends the same way. Do not panic.

So Roxie knows what to do in an avalanche, on the roof of a moving train, and in a desert with no water left in the canteen.

What she does not know is what to do about Helvetia's Hooligans, who have picked her as their victim of the year because her ears stick out.

The teasing is grim and it does not stop. They bray and howl and caw at her across the playground. They tape her ears flat until her cheeks go red. She starts arriving at school an hour early and staying late to empty the bins, and they simply wait for her.

Then one morning they turn up with a carton of eggs, Roxie runs out of playground, and she hides in the school skip. All four hooligans slip on the eggs and fall in on top of her.

And then the skip is lifted onto a lorry, driven to the coast, and tipped onto a rubbish barge.

After that it is five filthy children in the sea, an island, and Roxie pulling out one Thistlebottom rule after another while the hooligans chase her up the beach. Cover an alligator's eyes. Hit a bear on the snout. Run from bees through tall grass.

It is very funny, and the comedy is all in the gap between what the manual says and what is actually going on.

The bit that gets me happens in the dark, at the top of a tree. Roxie hears one of the hooligans crying below her, and instead of keeping quiet she says his name.

A word about the bullying, because there is a great deal of it and some of it is physical. Gravel gets thrown at her legs. Helvetia bites her leg hard enough that Roxie hits her on the nose. A child who is having a rough time at school might find the first third close to the bone, even though the book is on Roxie's side from the first page.

The chapters go quickly once the skip is in the air.

What to read next

Roxie's sort of resourcefulness turns up again in the Survivor Diaries book Overboard. Travis is eleven and out on a whale watching trip when the boat capsizes in cold water, and the rest is him and a girl called Marina working out how to stay alive.