What’s for Dinner, Mr Gum

What's for Dinner, Mr Gum by Andy Stanton is a gleefully grubby book for 7 year olds, and this time the good guys clear off in chapter one.

What happens

Polly, Friday O'Leary and Alan Taylor head to the seaside and announce they won't be back for weeks. Which leaves the town to the two men who have been waiting for exactly this.

Billy William the Third runs the butcher's shop. He keeps little scraps of meat tucked in his ears as treats for his pet flies. Mr Gum is his best friend, in the sense that they are both awful.

Billy is delighted. A whole town to ruin and nobody left to stop them.

Except Mr Gum doesn't turn up for his Friday dinner. Or the night after.

Billy sits with his feet on the counter staring at the clock, which doesn't help, because he never learned to tell the time. (The narrator pauses here to shout at you in capitals about bunking off school.)

When Mr Gum finally does appear, he walks straight past the butcher's shop and carries on down the road.

So Billy follows him. Down the slimy steps to the old canal, where the water is brown and useless, and on towards a neon sign fizzing away in the dark.

Mr Gum has been getting his dinner somewhere else. That's the betrayal the whole thing turns on, and it's a cracking engine for a story.

The narrator is the main event though. He argues with you. He asks your questions for you and then tells you to stop bothering him. He mentions in passing that he once drank the canal water and died.

At one point he sticks Billy on a magic unicorn called Elizabeth. Billy objects that he hasn't got a magic unicorn. So the paragraph is simply written out again without one.

Be aware, though. This one is genuinely grubby. There are entrails and stale burgers. There's a kebab shop where the owner does a poo in the cooking pot. And there's a monkey being made to turn the spit faster and faster while a chant runs on for pages.

Plenty of seven year olds will think that's the funniest thing they have ever read in their lives. A squeamish child, or one who mainly came for Polly being brave, may find this one a bit much.

It knows it's not the first book, by the way. Alan Taylor is 16.24 centimetres tall now, because he's grown a centimetre since the last one he was in.

What to read next

For another pair of narrators who won't stop talking to you, try The 13-Storey Treehouse. Andy and Terry invite you up on the first page, then Terry paints a cat yellow to turn it into a canary, and the annoying thing is that it works.