The Tapper Twins Go to War

Geoff Rodkey's The Tapper Twins Go to War is a very funny family story for 9 year olds about a brother and sister whose squabble turns into a full-blown war.

What happens

Claudia and Reese Tapper are twelve-year-old twins in New York. They agree on almost nothing. Not even who ate the last toaster pastry.

It all kicks off in the school canteen. Somebody lets off a very bad smell, and Reese points at his sister in front of the whole sixth grade and yells "Princess Farts-A-Lot!" Everyone laughs. Claudia cries in the loos.

So she buys a dead fish and hides it in the side pocket of his rucksack. Then she waits for the whole school to smell him.

Reese doesn't notice for DAYS. The coats in the hall cupboard do, though (and so does his friend's very tidy mum).

The whole thing is Claudia's "oral history" of the war. You get her version, Reese's version, interviews with their friends and the text messages their parents send each other. Reese keeps butting in to argue, and at one point he insists their row about the toaster pastry goes in word for word.

It's a bit like being the referee on a very long car journey. Both of them swear they're telling the truth, and neither of them quite is. Claudia tells you she never lies. Then she lies to her mum's face over dinner at a sushi restaurant and feels awful for days.

Who hasn't had a sibling row that got completely out of hand?

A couple of things may date it. Reese's friend Xander talks in a put-on rapper voice that's played as the joke, and Claudia calls her brother mentally challenged at one point. Neither has aged well, and they're worth a quick chat if your reader picks up on them.

Otherwise it's pranks, school gossip and two very different twins who can't stop getting one over on each other. If your reader loves stories told in lots of voices at once, this is a great fit.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, the twins are back in The Tapper Twins Tear Up New York, which is in the library too. Claudia's writing the history of a school scavenger hunt this time, because a newspaper got the whole story wrong.