Upside-Down Magic 3 – Showing Off

Showing Off is the third Upside-Down Magic book, by Sarah Mlynowski, Lauren Myracle and Emily Jenkins, a magic-school story for 8 year olds about a talent show one class cannot safely enter.

What happens

Nory is a Fluxer. Fluxers turn into animals, and most of them manage a cat. Nory turns into a dritten, which is a kitten crossed with a dragon, and once she's in there the animal mind tends to take over.

That's why she's at Dunwiddle now instead of her father's very grand academy. He's the headmaster there, and he sent her away.

The rest of her class are all a bit sideways too. Andres floats, so he spends lessons on the ceiling attached to a leash. Bax turns into a rock most days. Pepper is a Fuzzy in reverse, which means that instead of animals trusting her they're terrified of her, and she cannot switch it off.

Then the school announces the Show Off, where every class puts on an act. Nory thinks it sounds brilliant. Pepper knows precisely what will happen if she goes anywhere near it.

The set piece early on is worth the price of admission. The two of them are sent to fetch paint and walk into an art room where the teacher is currently a chimpanzee and an eighth grader is currently an elephant. It goes off like a firework. Paint everywhere, a hamster trapped under a chimp, an elephant straight through a window.

Then the whole class has to walk into assembly still covered in paint.

What lifts it above a chaos machine is Pepper. Her story is quietly sad. Her dad's job is taking gentle animals to visit people in care homes, and the family's golden retriever had to go and live at the kennels because he couldn't bear to be in the house with her.

There's a good deal of name-calling in this one. Lacey and her friends use wonko as a weapon and the book lets it sting before it does anything about it. A child who's had that at school may feel it land, though watching the class refuse to get smaller is rather the point.

What to read next

If they want to know how Nory ended up at Dunwiddle, the first Upside-Down Magic book opens with her hiding in the garage the night before the entrance exam, trying and trying to hold a plain black kitten.