The Terrible Two Get Worse

The Terrible Two Get Worse by Jory John and Mac Barnett is a funny school story for 9 year olds about two pranksters who finally go a step too far.

What happens

Miles Murphy and Niles Sparks are a secret club with two members. They plan in a walk-in cupboard painted floor to ceiling with chalkboard paint. Nobody at school suspects a thing, mostly because Niles spends his days being the most helpful boy who ever lived.

Their target is Principal Barkin. He cancelled Wacky Hair Day for frivolity. He shouts through a megaphone at children standing three feet away. He is, as Niles puts it, a dour balloon in a stuffed shirt.

Then comes school picture day. The whole school gathers on the lawn for the annual photograph, and the field violets that bloomed overnight turn out to be spelling something out. Barkin's own father hears about it. That is how a man loses his job to his dad.

The book knows exactly what it's doing to you. It stops to tell you facts about cows. It shows you the school photographs from 1883 and 1972. It interrupts itself with an aside in brackets and carries on as if nothing happened (your reader will start doing this out loud, so be warned).

Miles and Niles are good company because they take pranking extremely seriously. There are training exercises. There is an argument about Chekhov's gun versus Occam's razor, which Miles thinks are two Russian men. Silly and clever at the same time is a hard trick and this pulls it off.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing that the humour runs to cheese, feet and smells, and that a lot of adult stupidity gets played for laughs. Nobody is hurt and nobody is really cruel. The grown-ups come off far worse than the children, which is rather the point.

One moment catches you off guard. Miles watches Barkin get humiliated by his own father and asks Niles whether they ought to feel sorry for him. That question sits quietly under the rest of the book.

What to read next

Your reader will get more out of this if they've met the boys already, because how those two found each other is a proper story in itself. That's the first Terrible Two book, where Miles arrives in a town famous only for cows and discovers somebody has got there before him.