Yours Troolie, Alice Toolie

Kate and Jol Temple's Yours Troolie, Alice Toolie is a friendship story for 7 year olds told entirely in letters between two children who would rather be anywhere else.

What happens

Jimmy Cook read Alice Toolie's diary. He says he thought it was a book about echidnas, because there was a hedgehog on the cover. Alice says he's a robber and his apology is NOT accepted.

Their teacher Ms Fennel decides the two of them will be pen pals, and it lasts all term. Which, as Alice points out, is very unfair, since she wasn't the one who did the bad thing.

Every page is a letter, and it works brilliantly, because you get both sides of every argument and neither child will admit they're wrong about anything.

Jimmy calls himself Captain Jimmy Cook and claims to be a famous explorer. He has written to Alice from Ancient Egypt. He once caught the tooth fairy, who turned out to be a small old man who smelled a bit like bin juice.

Alice has 3,431 friends, a dog the size of an eggcup, and a dance routine she is getting sooo amazing at. She is famous three separate times and will list them for you.

The jokes come thick and fast, and a lot of them are in the sign-offs. Jimmy signs every letter differently. Yours anciently. Yours boyishly. Yours regretfully. Alice hits on Yours troolie because it rhymes with Toolie, and then uses it forever.

Then there's a ghost singing in the Level 2 toilets, and the two of them have to team up to catch it in a jar. Alice knows you catch ghosts with jars. Jimmy knows you need bait. What they end up using is porridge and some extremely smelly cheese.

It's Australian, so there are dollars rather than pounds, a school fete and a swimming carnival where you'd expect sports day. None of it will trip a reader up.

A heads-up on the humour. It's a book that thinks bottoms and bin juice are funny, and it is right about that, but there's a fair amount of it. The undies your mum packed by mistake, the smell of a pirate's monkey, a boy who got stuck in a preschool toilet.

For a child who enjoys the noise in their own head, this one is a treat. You can hear both of them showing off.

What to read next

If the back-and-forth is the bit they love, try Yours Sincerely, Giraffe. A bored giraffe posts a letter to the far side of the horizon, a penguin gets it, and neither of them has the faintest idea what the other one looks like.