Read To Wee or Not to Wee! free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Pamela Butchart's To Wee or Not to Wee is a laugh-out-loud Shakespeare collection for 7 year olds, with Izzy retelling the famous plays in her own very particular way.
Each story starts with something happening to Izzy and her friends. Zach can't choose between the hat and the car in Monopoly (or decide about pepperoni). So Izzy tells him about Hamlet, the prince who can never make up his mind.
In her version Hamlet has been at university for about twenty years because he can't decide what to be. His Ghost Dad haunts the castle complaining about leftover lasagne. And "To be or not to be" gets a brand new toilet-themed twist (which is where the title comes from!).
Then Miss Jones offers a Friday story and Izzy volunteers Macbeth, with the lights off and the curtains shut. Macbeth eats six bowls of porridge for breakfast and makes himself crowns out of kitchen roll. The witches have a beard, a tadpole eye and a tree-sized one.
When Jodi waltzes off with Gary Petrie at the school dance, Maisie is convinced she's been bewitched, so out comes A Midsummer Night's Dream, with a fairy queen falling for Bottom, whose head has been turned into a donkey's. And a falling-out between the mums becomes Romeo and Juliet.
What's lovely is that the real stories are all there under the silliness. The plots, the names and some of the famous lines. Your reader will probably come away knowing who Macduff is and what happens in Birnam Wood, and wanting to tell everyone.
These are still Shakespeare's tragedies, so people die, LOTS of them. In Hamlet nearly everyone is poisoned, Polonius is stabbed through a curtain and Ophelia drowns. In Macbeth a king is murdered in his sleep, Macduff's family are killed and Macbeth's head rolls into a duck pond.
It's all played for laughs (Hamlet takes forty-five minutes to finish dying). Even Miss Jones asks for a story with less blood. A sensitive child might still find the body count a lot. If your reader loves things gory and ridiculous, though, they'll think it's brilliant.
If they'd like Izzy and her friends in an adventure of their own, try There's a Werewolf in My Tent. A school camping trip, a very tall new PE teacher and some howling in the night set the whole gang off.
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