Uncle John’s The Enchanted Toilet

Uncle John's The Enchanted Toilet is a dip-in-and-dip-out book for 7 year olds, stuffed with odd facts, silly jokes, things to make and fairy tales gone wrong.

What happens

There's no single author on this one. It comes from the Uncle John's stable, the people behind all those bathroom readers, and it's built the way those books are built. Nothing runs for more than two or three pages. You open it anywhere.

The castle moat page is a good example of what it does well. It starts with a genuine history lesson about Bodiam Castle and a knight who had to ask the king's permission to build it, then works out what thirty-three medieval toilets emptying into one moat would actually have left at the bottom. Then it lists what was dredged out when somebody finally drained it. Cannonballs, a spearhead, two extra-wide horseshoes. Elsewhere there are lion skulls in the Tower of London moat and fifteen wartime mines in a German one.

Then it swings straight into a fairy tale where the shoemaker's elves turn out to be Elvis impersonators, and there's a hidden challenge to spot all the song titles.

Elsewhere you get three little jackalopes building houses out of concert flyers, drink cans and chewed gum. A wizard hat you can make out of construction paper, twigs and glitter spray. Ogre jokes. A long strange piece about Confucius and a unicorn.

That mix is the appeal and it's also the catch. Some of it's very silly and some of it assumes you already know what the Hundred Years' War was. Your reader will graze rather than read it straight through, and a confident 7 year old will get more out of it than a new one.

One page does need flagging. A section called A Visit to the Witch Doctor lists cures from South African tribal traditions, and the cures include drinking human blood, eating a slice of brain, ground-up finger bones and burying a human skull in a field. It's played for shock and it's written in an old-fashioned, gawping sort of way that a parent may want to talk about rather than leave sitting there. For a child who loves grisly facts it'll be the best page in the book. For a squeamish one it isn't.

It's American throughout, so it's dollars, math and soccer.

What to read next

If jokes are what your reader is actually after, point them at a giant book of jokes and riddles instead. That one's pure gags, sorted into long runs of vampire and mummy nonsense, with letter puzzles dropped in between.