Jeremy Strong’s Let’s Do the Pharaoh is a daft comedy for 8 year olds about an ancient Egyptian king who is living in a normal house and refusing to behave.<\/p>\n
Sennapod ruled Upper and Lower Egypt four and a half thousand years ago. These days he rules number 27 Templeton Drive, which he shares with Mr and Mrs Lightspeed and their children Carrie and Ben.<\/p>\n
He is a god, as he reminds everybody constantly.<\/p>\n
We meet him at Carrie’s dressing table, putting on eyeliner. Carrie tells him it’s gone on crooked. He asks whether she dares criticise the Lord of all Egypt. She says yes. She’s fifteen, and nobody sensible tries to boss a fifteen year old about.<\/p>\n
Then Ben starts doing a silly dance to wind his sister up, and Senny wants to know what on earth it is. He hasn’t danced in four and a half thousand years, he says. Not since he was wrapped in bandages and put in a coffin.<\/p>\n
So he has a go. Stiff arms shooting out at angles. Legs up and down at the wrong moments. A slow turn with weird hen-pecking movements of the head.<\/p>\n
Ben falls over laughing. Carrie thinks it’s the coolest thing she’s ever seen and makes him teach her every step.<\/p>\n
Both of them end up bouncing on the bed with the radio on full, until Mrs Lightspeed arrives to point out the crack that has appeared in the ceiling downstairs. Senny tells her to begone, foul woman. She informs him that she is the Queen of Kwiggly Kwoo, and he believes her instantly.<\/p>\n
That’s the joke the whole book runs on. A four-thousand-year-old god has absolutely no idea how any of this works, and the Lightspeeds have stopped explaining.<\/p>\n
There’s a competition entry already in the postbox, a treasure map that two villains still want, and a great many cats who follow Senny about wherever he goes. His own cat is called Crusher of Worms, which is a fine name for a cat with a gold earring.<\/p>\n
The sibling sniping is worth a mention. Ben and Carrie go at each other constantly and it gets personal, mostly about how Carrie looks. She’d scare people to death without make-up, he says, because she’s so ugly. It’s clearly meant as brother-and-sister noise rather than anything real, and Carrie gives back as good as she gets. Still, if there’s a child in your house who is a bit raw about their appearance, that’s the bit to know about before you hand it over.<\/p>\n
This isn’t the first Sennapod book and it doesn’t stop to catch you up, though there’s nothing you can’t work out as you go.<\/p>\n
Sigurd the Viking pulls the same trick a few thousand years later. There’s a Viking in My Bed drops him off his longboat into a modern English seaside town, where he turns out to be just as much use as he was on the boat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jeremy Strong’s Let’s Do the Pharaoh is a daft comedy for 8 year olds about an ancient Egyptian king who is living in a normal house and refusing to behave. Sennapod ruled Upper and Lower Egypt four and a half thousand years ago. These days he rules number 27 Templeton Drive, which he shares with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11172,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":9563,"lr_next_read_anchor":"There's a Viking in My Bed","lr_seo_hook":"A pharaoh in a suburban house, learning to dance on the bed."},"book_tag":[23],"age_group":[26],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[463],"class_list":["post-7931","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-funny-books","age_group-books-for-8-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-jeremy-strong"],"yoast_title":"Let’s Do the Pharaoh! by Jeremy Strong | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A pharaoh in a suburban house, learning to dance on the bed. For ages 8+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n