The Schnoz of Doom

Andrea Beaty's The Schnoz of Doom is a very silly alien invasion story for 8 year olds, and the killer rabbits in this one smell.

What happens

The narrator is the best bit and you meet him straight away. He opens on a bubble of gas rising through a pond of grey slime, three ragged creatures watching it with enormous noses, and then tells you to remember this because it's important later.

He does this constantly. He starts a chapter with When suddenly. Then he admits nothing sudden happened and he just liked the sound of it.

There's a whole explanation of where the bunnies came from. Their own cousins fired them into space with a giant slingshot during the Great Pudding Wars, and they landed on a planet made almost entirely of stink. The ones with the biggest noses could live off the smell, so those are the ones left. Now they read your mind through your nose. This is called smellepathy, and yes, the book does explain the difference between olfactory and old factory.

When the narrator gets to what the bunnies actually did that was so awful, most of the sentence is missing. He says the publisher took the dangerous bits out to stop your brain exploding. Your reader will read those blanks about four times.

Then there's Joules and Kevin Rockman, twins, whose parents are scientists and think of breakfast as an experiment. Kevin is sitting in front of a bowl of purple soup, taking notes on the fumes instead of eating it. Both of them have a Pop-Tart stash hidden under the sofa for exactly this reason.

They run out of separate doors while their mum is head-first in the fridge looking for cheese spray. Then a newspaper lands at their feet. A rocket has crashed near the tissue factory, and it looks exactly like the one from the summer.

Which they know all about, because they have done this before.

If your reader likes a book that keeps talking to them, this is a gift. There are tables, there are asides, there is a running argument between the narrator and the reader, and quite a lot of the humour is about bottoms, snot and smells. You'll know already whether that's a selling point in your house.

The peril is proper cartoon peril, going by the opening. Hypnotising, devouring, world domination, all delivered with a joke on top.

What to read next

They will want the first one afterwards, so here it is. Attack of the Fluffy Bunnies drops the twins at Camp Whatsitooya expecting marshmallows and canoes, and gives them seven-foot sugar-addicted rabbits instead.