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The Prizewinners of Piedmont Place by Bill Doyle is a fast, noisy family comedy for 8 year olds, and it begins with a raw pancake going into a ceiling fan.
Cal Talaska is eleven and he has a plan. The plan begins with throwing a raw pancake into the ceiling fan.
The pancake explodes. The dog bounces like a pony on a trampoline. Cal's four year old brother Bug, who has stopped talking and mostly barks these days, crashes into the dog, and Mum comes through the swinging kitchen door with a lump of batter on her forehead.
That is exactly the chaos Cal wanted, because it gets everyone into one room at one time.
His family are lovely and completely unmanageable. Dad wears his glasses at an angle when he writes music and rhymes when he is nervous. Nine year old Imo patches the car tyre herself and would very much like you to agree that she is the best mechanic in the world. The car is called the Flying Monkey and has We Are Family stuck on a loop in the CD player, which nobody is allowed to fix.
Cal steers them all out of the house, past a crowd at the edge of a cornfield, and into a line of families standing behind a white line on the grass. By the time his mum asks what on earth is going on, a starter cannon has gone off and they are in the first round of the Great Grab.
The challenge is a twenty foot pole with a purple butterfly on top. The poles have been greased. Watching a whole town try to climb them is the best sequence in the opening, and the football coach comes off worst.
What holds it together is that Cal is not really in it for the prize. He has a reason he is not saying yet, and that little gap between what he tells his family and what he actually wants gives the silliness something solid underneath.
His family are not fooled either. Being told off by five people at once, in the middle of a field, in front of your dad's boss, is a comedy of its own.
It is American through and through, so expect dollars, Mom and a superstore the size of a farm. Nothing your reader will trip over.
For a reader who likes a competition nobody saw coming, try Grandma's Game Show, which is here too. Louie turns up at his gran's for chocolate chip cookies, finds the kitchen empty and the oven still warm, and then finds his gran waving at him from her own television.
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