The Tapper Twins Tear Up New York

Geoff Rodkey's The Tapper Twins Tear Up New York is a very funny school story for 9 year olds told as a row between a brother and a sister.

What happens

Claudia is writing the official history of the school scavenger hunt. She's writing it because a newspaper got the story wrong and she is still furious about it.

She interviewed everyone. So the book is made of those interviews, stacked one on top of the next, plus her parents' text messages, which she has copied off her mum's phone without asking.

Reese, her twin, gets to answer back on every page. That's where most of the jokes live.

Claudia's version is that she is sixth-grade president and she wanted the school to raise cash for a food bank, which it did, $8,748.75 of it. Reese's version is that the scavenger hunt was his idea and she stole it.

He's sort of right. He got it from a video game.

Then the prize turns out to be four front-row seats to anything at Madison Square Garden, and the whole school loses its mind.

You know from page one that it ends badly. Claudia admits there was technically a fracas. She admits some of what Reese's team did was not strictly legal. She's very keen for you to understand that nobody actually filed a lawsuit.

Reading it is almost no effort at all, in the best way. Nobody speaks for more than a few lines. There are Editor's Notes squeezed in where Claudia can't help herself, like when she labels one of Reese's friends "also MAJOR idiot".

She even cut two whole chapters because her friends told her they were boring, then tells you what was in them anyway, while her co-chair complains bitterly that Chapter 3 was the best one.

If reading is a bit of a slog in your house but funny gets through, this shape really helps. Your reader can put it down mid-argument and pick it straight back up.

Two small things. The video game Reese loves is one where you kill other players and take their stuff, described cheerfully and often. And one of his mates, a boy from an extremely old and wealthy family, is written speaking in heavy fake street slang as a running joke, which lands oddly now and might be worth a word.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who wants to know what these two are like when they really go for each other, The Tapper Twins Go to War is another of Claudia's histories, and that one involves the police.