The Tapper Twins Run for President

The Tapper Twins Run for President by Geoff Rodkey is a very funny school story for 9 year olds, told in interviews, text messages and screenshots rather than ordinary chapters.

What happens

Claudia Tapper is twelve and intends to run the whole country one day. Not straight away. First she plans to be re-elected president of the sixth grade at Culvert Prep, which she assumes is a formality.

Her twin brother Reese has no interest in student government at all, right up to the day the vice principal bans football from the school roof. (The roof is the playground. It is New York and there is nowhere else to put one.)

Reese wants the ban gone. Somebody points out that the class president could do something about it. And so he runs against his sister.

The format is the joy of it. Claudia has assembled the whole book as the official history of her campaign, with interviews from everybody involved, and she keeps adding her own notes in the margin to correct them. Reese insists he only smells bad five days out of seven. Claudia adds a note. Their dad's phone password ends up printed in the book because he left it lying on the counter.

Everyone gets to give their version and the versions do not match. Your reader works out what actually happened by reading around the edges of what each person claims, which is a genuinely clever thing to hand a 9 year old.

It is also a real explanation of how politics works, smuggled in behind jokes about dogslaughter. Dictatorship and democracy get defined using the family flat as the example. Negative campaigning turns up and does what negative campaigning does. There is a rival candidate whose entire platform is that some of the teachers may be secret robots.

Two things to mention. It is thoroughly American, so it is sixth grade, a middle school election and a class treasurer, with the vocabulary to match. And one character, Xander, talks in a heavy imitation rap slang. It is written as a joke about a very rich boy trying it on, but it is laid on thick and it may well need a conversation.

Nothing frightening, nothing sad, nothing to worry about on content. This is an easy sell for a child who likes pictures, lists and screenshots breaking up the page.

What to read next

For another helping of these two, The Tapper Twins Go to War is the oral history Claudia put together before this one, about the prank war that ended with the police getting involved.