The Bolds in Trouble

Julian Clary's The Bolds in Trouble is a very silly story for 6 year olds about a family of hyenas living in Teddington and passing as human.

What happens

Fred Bold writes the jokes for Christmas crackers. Amelia sells unusual hats at the market. The twins, Bobby and Betty, go to the local school. Nobody on Fairfield Road has worked it out, although the neighbours have noticed that the Bolds laugh an awful lot.

Next door there's a grizzly bear called Nigel. Upstairs there's a marmoset who sleeps inside an elderly hyena's T-shirt. In the front room there are three new students learning to wear clothes, and a goose is currently losing that argument with a pair of trousers.

Then Bobby's cheese sandwich vanishes off the kitchen counter.

The Bolds sniff the air and know exactly who took it. A fox. A very bold, very greedy fox called Mossy who has been helping himself up and down the street in broad daylight.

And that's the trouble in the title. The neighbours have had enough and they call a meeting.

Your reader should know what gets decided at that meeting, because the book doesn't soften it. The residents vote to bring in a pest control firm, and it's said out loud that the foxes will be killed rather than released. Mrs Bold cries on the way home. If you've got a child who worries about animals, read that chapter alongside them.

Everything else is gleefully daft. The narrator keeps interrupting to tell you about the buffaloes who delivered his sofa. Mr Bold cannot get through a scene without a joke, and the jokes are proper groaners.

What did the cheese say when it looked in the mirror? Halloumi.

There's one early scene where a prank goes badly wrong and old Uncle Tony ends up choking on a squirt of mustard. The book stops being funny for a page, the twins are properly told off, and Tony forgives them. It's handled, but it's there.

The Bolds are on the foxes' side throughout, which is rather the point. They creep into Bushy Park at midnight to warn them and get bitten on the ankles for their trouble.

This is a later Bolds adventure, so the family are already established when you arrive, though nothing here needs the earlier books to make sense.

What to read next

If a house full of animals in cardigans is the appeal, there's a wood full of them in Attack of the Stink Monster. Grimwood has a stag for a mayor, a jam-making contest, a party crow called Sharon, and a thief on the loose.