Friday 30 June 2017

ReaditDaddy's Chapter Book of the Week - Week Ending 30th June 2017 - "The World's Worst Children 2" by David Walliams and Tony Ross (HarperCollins Children's Books)

Wow! Our first David Walliams review, which seems absolutely incredible considering how many books this talented fella has now written...and it nails Chapter Book of the Week for this week...
"The World's Worst Children 2" is another compendium of chaos from an author who specialises in the sort of anarchic and chaotic comedy that belies his roots as a comedy writer and performer par excellence.

I've actually been a bit of a fan of David's comedy for what seems like donkey's years now (if you can remember as far back as his stints on shows like the Dennis Pennis series and one particularly weird performance on hit comedy Spaced - which we probably can't talk about in too much detail on a children's book blog).

So it's no surprise then that he's a huge hit with kids too.

"The World's Worst Children" doesn't dish up those clean-cut inquisitive well meaning types from the likes of the Famous Five or Mallory Towers books. No, these kids are rotten to the core. Badly behaved, quite often scheming, dishonest, stubborn, sometimes a bit whiffy.

David and Tony follow up their first "Worlds Worst Children" book with even more characters you really wouldn't want to end up living next door to.

Meet Gruesome Griselda,  Fussy Frankie and the glorious return of Raj!

As ever, the book is illustrated by Tony Ross, this time letting the master of chaotic children's illustration loose with a rich palette of colours to really make these characters stand out. 

Charlotte was utterly glued to this from day one (surprisingly so far we've had a tough time getting hold of Walliams' books, they're always out on loan in our local library and if we go into a bookshop to buy one, Madame usually gets distracted by other shiny books and inevitably buys something else!)

But this got a huge thumbs up - probably because no child can resist the lure of seeing a collection of kids who seem to get away with behaving atrociously (I mean for goodness sake, eating your own mother!!!)

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! But Charlotte is still not happy about this whole "The next Roald Dahl" business (and I'm not sure I am either) but Walliams is very much as close as you're going to get. 

We definitely need to read quite a few more of his books for sure. 



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