Review: Darcy Burdock by Laura Dockrill

Introducing Darcy Burdock, a new, cool, all-conquering girl character with a fresh and distinctive take on the world.

Ten-year-old Darcy is one of life's noticers. Curious, smart-as-a-whip, funny and fiercely loyal, she sees the extraordinary in the everyday and the wonder in the world around her.

Britain finally has an answer to Jeff Kinney and his Wimpy Kid! Many have tried, but few have come close in my opinion, but come next March the trials and tribulations of Greg Heffley will be consigned to bargain bins in book stores across the UK. There will only be one name on everyone's lips, and that is Darcy Burdock. (OK make that two names as Darcy's creator, Laura Dockrill, is certainly not someone who will be easily overlooked and/or forgotten).

Before I say any more about Darcy Burdock I feel I need to make a couple of things clear. This blog is called is The Book Zone (For Boys), but this does not mean that the books I review are only for boys. Far from it, and I know that there are many girls who read and comment on this blog. The point of this blog is to showcase books that boys should find interesting and fun to read, and many of these are just as suitable for girls. Darcy Burdock is possibly a book that some may be a little surprised to find reviewed here, but bear with me and I will let my love this this book be fully explained. Secondly, I very rarely post reviews so far ahead of publication date, but the lovely people at Red Fox are so excited about this book that they are happy for reviews to start appearing now.

I first heard about Darcy Burdock when I met the book's writer and illustrator, Laura Dockrill, at the Random House Bloggers' Brunch earlier this year. Laura read a few pages to us, and I was immediately hooked, even though I had initially thought it might not be a book that would sit well on my blog. I couldn't have been more wrong - just two pages from Laura and I knew I had to read this book when it was published. Thanks to the lovely people at Red Fox I haven't had to wait until February, as a proof copy landed on my door mat just a couple of weeks ago, and I pretty much dropped everything to read it.

Darcy Burdock is not written in diary format, but most of it is written in first person and Darcy's voice will have you crying tears of laughter within the first few pages. The best word I can come up with to describe the way Darcy tells her story is 'RANDOM' - as you read it you can't help but imagine the "ten but so nearly eleven" year old girl standing in front of you, talking at a thousand words a second, her mind making massive leaps from subject to subject. She twists words around and makes up her own (Angrosaurus Rex, mermalade, kneebows). And best of all, she notices everything, which means her descriptions of life and the people she encounters are to die for. I can't remember the last time I read a first person narrative where the character sounded so real from the very first page, and I guarantee that masses of children  and probably adults too, will fall head over heels for Darcy come next March.

There are parts of the book that aren't written in Darcy's voice, as she also includes some of her own stories. You see, Darcy desperately wants to be a writer, and when something affects her, be it making her angry or sad, she invariably turns to her coveted notebook and turns her thoughts into a story. And wonderfully, these add to the appeal of the book rather than distract the reader from Darcy's ramblings, as her writing voice is just as funny and endearing.

I'm going to be shouting about this book for some time as I really think that it has huge boy appeal - it is certainly NOT a girly book. I guess that the marketing for Darcy Burdock will be somewhat more girl oriented than boy friendly, but I really hope that this book finds its way into the hands of just as many boys as girls, as I reckon the 8+ age group will love it. It is also a fab read-by-parent-at-bedtime book as well, although I'm not sure anyone could read it out loud as well as the author, so let's hope that Laura's desire for it to be released as an audio book, read by her, is realised.

Darcy Burdock is scheduled to be published on 28th February 2013, and if you haven't heard of Laura Dockrill before now then expect her to become a household name sometime in the next year. I hear from the people at Random House that Laura will be appearing all over the place in 2013, and if she is doing an event in a town near you then make sure you get along to it as I know that you love every minute of it. In the meantime, you can follow Laura and Darcy on Twitter (@LauraDockrill and @DarcyBurdock). To find out more about Laura you can visit her website at http://www.lauradockrill.co.uk/

GRYMM Blog Tour: Guest Post by Keith Austin

Earlier this month I posted my review of GRYMM, the uber-creepy new book from author Keith Austin, and today we are joined by Keith as part of his blog tour. One of the stand out elements of GRYMM for me was its truly grotesque and characters and so when asked what I would be interested in as a guest post I begged for something character related. I subsequently received this fantastic piece about Malahide Fleur, one of those deeply-disturbing characters from the book:

(Excerpt from Grymmer: The True Story of the Town that Died of Shame by Eric Elland)

Malahide Fleur came into existence in a small village, a speck really, in the far reaches of the south of France, the only son of the local baker. As a baby he looked like a large wriggly maggot, all chubby cheeks and rolls of fat. It was like he had been born without bones.

            His father thought he looked like an uncooked croissant; his mother, on the other hand, didn’t think much of him at all and was gone by the time he was six years old. So Malahide Fleur grew up indulged by his doting father, an eternally chubby boy waddling along behind him in the crepuscular light before dawn, watching the magical process by which water and flour and sugar and butter and yeast became the cakes and rolls and baguettes that Monsieur Fleur sold in his old timbered patisserie-boulangerie in the town square.

            The people came from far and wide to visit Fleur et Fils, their greedy eyes feasting on the beautiful wares that sat in the window, their noses sniffing in the comforting smell of baking bread and the honey-brown aroma of melting sugar.

            However, it wasn’t long before Fleur pere was surpassed by Fleur fils. Malahide was, he discovered, gifted. He had the touch, the golden something that turned a simple mille-feuille into a million dollars in your mouth. Malahide, who was never seen in the front of the shop, nevertheless created little peepholes in the walls where he could watch people dig into their paper bags before they even left the shop. He loved to see their eyes close as they bit into his pastries and cakes.

            But it still wasn’t enough. It was as if the more expert he became at his art the more he could see its flaws and imperfections. He was like a great painter who could only see the one errant brushstroke in an otherwise perfect artwork. And it drove him crazy. WHY were his croissants not symmetrical? WHY did that lemon cake rise differently every time?

            His father indulged him for a while but then came the incident with 92-year-old Alabaster Fresnoy and the hell-hot chilli-and-chive croissant that caused her so much distress (see Grymm, pages 106/7). It was an experiment too far. The cat that had somehow puked up his own bottom was one thing – as was the rabbit that somehow became addicted to, well, rabbit and ate its own right leg – but putting Mrs Fresnoy into hospital …

            His father didn’t understand. His father forbade him to continue his … work. “You keep this up, you kill someone, mon petit asticot. So, non, non, non. Arrete, I say, arrete now.”

            His father seemed to think that good enough was good enough. And it wasn’t.

            His father laughed at him.

            And when he wasn’t laughing he was angry. Especially when Malahide threw away a perfectly good batch of dough because it hadn’t risen “properly”. After that it was a beating. And another. And another.

            And then one day the village awoke to find an obscenely fat teenager, a gargantuan, pasty-white wobbly man-boy, standing in the street screaming for people to “come quick, come quick!”

            And they came quickly to find the older Fleur face down in the bowl of the mixer, the curved blade caught against his body, his head and shoulders deep in a batch of sticky dough.

            (Afterwards, they said the son made bread out of the very same dough in which his father had perished.)

            The products on sale had changed then; the cakes became sweeter, the cream creamier, the bread tastier. Within weeks the shop was crammed with rabid, frantic customers every morning. Fights broke out over the baguettes, curses were uttered by the pain au raisins and woe betide anyone who got between the mayor and his tuiles aux amandes.

            And then, one bright day, the shop didn’t open at all and the crowds went wild. They ripped up the ancient cobbles from the main square and smashed the windows to get at the patisseries. Men and women fought over the gateaux, grabbing handfuls and stuffing them into their mouths despite the broken glass.

            By the time the gendarmes arrived two people were dead, three were clinically insane, and the rest were sitting around covered in cream and strawberry jam – only, on closer inspection, it wasn’t strawberry jam.

            In the basement they found a table heaped with old cookbooks and ancient scrolls written in ink and quill, with blood and finger, forbidden books, hidden books; books for a man in search of the perfect recipes and who would do anything to uncover them.

            On top of the oven they found a nondescript black baking tray on which row after row of gingerbread men were lined up. As they watched they began to twitch and move. When one of them sat up and bared little razor-sharp teeth the police pushed them to the floor and crushed them under their big black boots.

Grymm by Keith Austin is out now, published by Random House imprint Red Fox.

Review: GRYMM by Keith Austin

The small mining town of Grymm perched on the very edge of the Great Desert is the kind of town you leave - but when Dad gets a three-month contract in the mine there, Mina and Jacob, unwilling stepbrother and sister, are reluctantly arriving.

From a grotesque letting agent who seems to want to eat their baby brother, a cafe owner whose milkshakes contain actual maggots and the horribly creepy butcher, baker and candlestick-maker, Mina and Jacob soon realize that nothing in Grymm is what is appears to be.

And then things get seriously weird when their baby brother disappears - and no one seems to even notice! In Grymm, your worst nightmares really do come true . . .

I first heard about GRYMM by Keith Austin back in January at the Random House Bloggers' Brunch. At that event it was described as being a little like TV's The League of Gentlemen, and as this is one of my all time favourite TV comedy series how could I be anything by excited about reading this book? Fast forward to a few weeks ago when a copy of GRYMM came through my letterbox and I dropped everything to read it. Unfortunately reviewing it is a completely different matter as I think it is unlike pretty much any other book I have read and I'm really not sure how to describe it.

I guess I will start off my saying that I absolutely loved it but I have a feeling that this could become the Marmite of YA books, as there will probably be more than a few people who will hate it. And I'm not sure there is any room for sitting on the fence with this one. However, if you like your stories to be darker than a city banker's soul then GRYMM is for you.

Step-siblings Jacob and Mina hate each other with a passion, but unfortunately for them their respective parents are now married, and together have added a third child to the family. Baby Bryan is the only thing about which the pair agree - they both think he is the most disgustingly smelly creature ever to have been born (and I think that Keith Austin's descriptions of this child will have most readers agreeing with them). The threesome have been relocated with their parents to the middle of nowhere for the school holidays, as Mina's geologist father has been contracted to carry out some studies Grymm's local mine. As soon as they arrive in the town they realise that it is probably going to be very different from your average town, and they are certainly not wrong.

The first resident of Grymm that they meet is the sinister Thespa Grymm, who can only be described as witch-like in her appearance. Both Jacob and Mina are pretty creeped out by Thespa, and the conversation that ensues does little to change their first impressions of this strange woman. However, the pair soon discover that she is only one of a host of truly weird and potentially dangerous people in the town. Thespa Grymm warns the family that "nothing is quite what it seems in Grymm", and never has a truer word been said. 

Shortly after the family's arrival in Grymm the step-siblings awake one morning to an unusual silence. They soon discover that Bryan has gone missing, and worse still neither of their parents have any memory of him ever having existed. So begins a dark adventure that sees the pair fleeing for their lives on more than a handful of occasions as they try to get to the bottom of the mystery that is the town of Grymm and its mine.

Like the TV comedy show GRYMM was semi-likened to, it is full of grotesque and deeply-disturbing characters, and the town of Grymm is like an out-back version of Royston Vasey, situated on the edge of a desert rather than the rural north of England. Other inhabitants of the town include Maggot, owner of Maggot's Milk Bar (you really do not want to drink one of Maggot's shakes; Cleaver Flay the butcher, a man who has OCD as far as cleanliness is concerned, but the meat in his shop may come from rather questionable sources; Malahide Fleur, the baker, whose wares are the most tempting pastries known to man, but don't hang around for too long or....... I could list a host of other characters, but I won't as every one of them is a macabre treat just waiting to be discovered by the reader.

This book is one of those that really does need to be read to be believed, and I only wish I could come up with a more coherent way of describing it. Dark, macabre, bizarre, hilarious, chilling - none of those words are really enough, although together they may give you something of an idea what to expect when you open this book and venture into the town where nothing is quite what it seems.

News: Book Cover for GRYMM by Keith Austin

Back in January I attended the RHCB Bloggers' Brunch, during which the RHCB team waxed lyrical about some of their 2012 releases. One of the books that I starred multiple times in the set of book blurbs they gave us is GRYMM by Keith Austin, and today I spotted the cover on Keith's blog and felt I just had to share it with you (even though it has been on there since January). The RHCB team described GRYMM as a darkly humorous horror story, in the vein of The League of Gentlemen. As a huge fan of said TV comedy show I was sold immediately, so I was looking forward to reading it even without seeing this brilliant cover, or reading the blurb. GRYMM is due to be published in July... I can't wait! Once you've let you eyes feast on this great cover you could do a lot worse than head on over to the RHCB blog and read a little more about the inspiration behind GRYMM in Keith's own words..

The small mining town of Grymm perched on the very edge of the Great Desert is the kind of town you leave - but when Dad gets a three-month contract in the mine there, Mina and Jacob, unwilling stepbrother and sister, are reluctantly arriving.

From a grotesque letting agent who seems to want to eat their baby brother, a cafe owner whose milkshakes contain actual maggots and the horribly creepy butcher, baker and candlestick-maker, Mina and Jacob soon realize that nothing in Grymm is what is appears to be.

And then things get seriously weird when their baby brother disappears - and no one seems to even notice! In Grymm, your worst nightmares really do come true . . .

Review: That's So Gross series by Mitchell Symons

Boys love facts. And the more disgusting these facts are, the better. As I have mentioned on The Book Zone in the past, some of the most popular books in the school library are The Guiness Book of Records and Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Every break time there are groups of boys gathered around the various volumes of these that we have on the shelves, and sometimes we have to step in and encourage them to enjoy them in a slightly less rowdy manner, especially where Ripley's is concerned. Thus, when these four books arrived from the generous people at Random House I decided that before going through them myself I would put them to the test in the school library. We took the boys' favourites off the shelf for one break time and had these ready in their place, and then sat back to observe their reaction.

Their reaction spoke volumes. After the initial disappointment at the absence of their glossy, large format favourites they were soon gathered around in their groups, taking it in turns to flick through whichever book they had in search of the grossest fact they could find. Cue raucous laughter and non-stop giggling for the next twenty minutes - Mitchell Symons's That's So Gross books passed the test with flying colours!

If the name Mitchell Symons sounds familiar to you it is probably because he has won several awards for some of his previous fact-filled books, most notably the Best Book With Facts category of the Blue Peter Book Awards in both 2010 and 2011. The end of March saw the publication of his brand series, titled That's So Gross, consisting of four books aimed at the 7+ age range. The four books in the series each focus on a different theme: Human Body; Animals; Creepy Crawlies; and History, and they are all totally rammed full of facts that kids will find really cool and totally gross. And if I'm perfectly honest, I reckon a good number of adults will also have a lot of fun flicking though these - us Brits are world renowned for our fondness of toilet humour and these certainly deliver in that respect.

These books are aimed at the 7+ market, but they definitely have appeal to older children (the boys we tested them on in the library were 11/12 year olds). Some more conservative parents may be surprised at the content of these books as a handful of the facts might be deemed a little too 'extreme' for kids of this age, so if you feel that this might be a problem it is definitely worth having a quick read through these before giving them to your children. However, if this sort of thing doesn't bother you, or your children are a little older, these are perfect for journeys or holidays as not only are they great fun to read, they are also fairly small format and easily packed in a child's day bag. To find out more then why not pop over to Mitchell's Gross Books website at http://www.grossbooks.co.uk

My Life That Books Built #2: The Giant Jam Sandwich

In part one of my new semi-regular feature about the books that I have loved as I have grown up (in no particular order) I wrote about the first book I can remember owning, Little Jacko and the Wolf People. Sadly this book is no longer in print, but today's book seems to have been rarely out of print since it was first published in 1972. This week I am again looking at a picture book, and I know there will be many adult readers of the Book Zone who will share my love of The Giant Jam Sandwich by John Vernon Lord and Janet Burroway. Thanks to the generosity of the people at Random House, who have just republished the book under their Red Fox imprint, I now have a sparkling new copy to fill me with nostalgic feelings.

Some books age poorly, but I am happy to say that The Giant Jam Sandwich is not one of those. In my opinion it is still as funny and as fresh today as it was when it was first published, and it is certainly worthy of a place in any small child's book collection. If you don't know about this book (and it astounded me recently when my wife and my sister both claimed never to have heard of it) then you are in for as big a treat as any child you read it to for the first time. How's this for a premise:

One hot summer in Itching Down,

Four million wasps flew into town.

What are the villagers going to do about this noisy, nasty nuisance of a swarm? Make a giant jam sandwich - that's what!

Sometimes the simplest ideas really are the best, and this story is wonderfully simple: an English country village is invaded by wasps (four million of the beggars) and so the residents come up with a plan to solve this problem that even the A-Team would have been impressed with - they will create a giant jam sandwich to lure the wasps, because:

"Then Bap the Baker leaped to his feet

And cried,, "What do wasps like best to eat?

Strawberry jam! Now wait a minute!

If we made a giant jam sandwich we could trap them in it!"

The word classic is often overused, but in this case I feel that it is thoroughly deserved. John Vernon Lord's illustrations are of a style that was very popular when the book was written, but in this sparkling new edition they don't seem old fashioned at all, even if the fashions depicted are not exactly the latest trends. Although as the images depict a the people of a stereotypical Midsomer style country village (without the Murders of course) maybe the styles of clothing weren't particularly typical of the time back then either. Janet Burroway's simple and humorous rhymes are the perfect complement to Lord's images, and I am sure that there will be many children who, once they have progressed onto reading for themselves, will continue to enjoy this book. With this new edition Red Fox have ensured that the quality of the story is matched by quality packaging - the images are bright and clear, and all printed on a good quality paper, ensuring that this story will continue to be loved by many more children.

Review: Father Christmas Needs A Wee by Nicholas Allan

"Father Christmas needs a wee.

He's been drinking drinks since half past three . . ."

At each different house that he visits Father Christmas drinks and eats all the goodies left out for him. Before long he really, really, really needs a wee.

I started off December intending to focus on books targeted at younger boys than many of the books that I tend to review are. Things haven't quite worked out as planned due to work and other blogging commitments, but now that school is nearly done I hope to review a few more picture books over the coming week.

Father Christmas Needs A Wee will have three and four year olds giggling away. Let's face it, most boys love toilet humour, whatever their age, and this book really hits the spot for the youngest end of the spectrum. Many children have wondered just how Santa manages to visit so many homes in one night, but how many have asked how he copes with all the fizzy drinks, tea, brandy, and other sundry beverages that are left out for him? Well now we have the answer.

Not only is it funny but it also has an educational element to it in the form of the counting rhymes that makes up the story. First of all we count up with an increasing number of drinks in each house that Santa visits, and then later we count back down again from ten as he goes back to the houses where he forgot to leave presents due to his concentration being distracted by the uncomfortable strain upon his bladder.

I was lucky to receive a special edition of the book which also includes an audio CD, with which we can listen to the story being read by the legend that is Bernard Cribbins. Hearing BC reading a story brought back many fond memories of watching Jackanory when I was a child - this man really knows how to read a story.

I have one small moan from a design point of view - although the illustrations are generally fun and brightly coloured, there are a couple of pages where black text has been used on a dark blue background, making it a little difficult to read easily. This may not be a problem in the home but if this was being bought to read out loud to a class of children, whilst pointing to the words, then they would not be able to make the words out from a distance.

However, I am positive that boys in the 3-4 age group will want to hear this read to them over and over again, and will probably want to join in as they become able to follow words more confidently. Is it very wrong of me to be hoping that there will one day be a sequel called Father Christmas Needs A Poo? :-)

Father Christmas Needs A Wee is published by Red Fox, to whom I am very grateful for the copy of the book that I was sent to review. 

Review: Maze of Death by Philip Caveney

1925. Crete.

After the terrors of Egypt and Mexico, a trip to Crete seems to offer Alec, Ethan and Coates a rare chance to relax – but an encounter with mysterious millionaire Tobias Wolfe brings them a tempting invitation to his private island, where he promises them a rare opportunity to visit its incredible archaeological treasures. But not all the island’s secrets are so inviting....

Upon arrival, the three friends and their fellow visitors are taken captive and subjected to a series of tests of skill and stamina, all inspired by the myths and legends of Ancient Greece.

As the ‘games’ become ever more deadly, a desperate struggle for survival ensues – and Alec must face his own terrifying challenge, deep in the dark heart of the labyrinth.

Alec Devlin is back in his third adventure. If you have not yet come across Philip Caveney's books about his young adventurer then you have some catching up to do. The first book in the series, The Eye of the Serpent, introduced to Alec as he travelled to meet up with his archaeologist uncle, only to find himself up against the spirit of an ancient and powerful High Priest. Book two, Empire of the Skull, had Alec involved in a plane crash deep in the Mexican jungle, and then fighting for his life against a long lost tribe of Aztec warriors. Alec is the sort of boy who finds trouble wherever he goes; despite being headstrong and something of a risk taker it is not always his fault that he and his valet Coates seem to find themselves up against the nastiest of villains whenever they go away together.

In the Maze of Death, Alec and Coates have travelled to Crete. Alec is soon to start university, studying anthropolgy, and despite the scrapes he has got into in the previous books he has presuaded his never-present father that he should be allowed to go to the Mediterranean island to see the excavations at Knossos and learn a little more about the ancient Minoan civilization. Accompanying them is Ethan Wade, a brash american who Alec met in his first adventure and who has since become Alec's (much needed) bodyguard. Despite promises to his father about staying out of trouble, it isn't long before the group find themselves up against a particularly nasty foe, the mysterious millionaire Tobias Wolfe, and boy is he one vicious villain. Alec has met evil before but Wolfe has to be the worst so far - he is clearly insane in that he believes he is the reincarnation of the ancient King Minos, and he uses other humans as entertainment in games and tests that resemble something out of the SAW movies.

The Alec Devlin books are great for the 9+ age group. Yes they are violent at times, but there is rarely anything too graphic, and we all know that boys love a little blood in their stories. I really enjoyed The Eye of the Serpent, and found it very Young Indiana Jones-esque, although I did not enjoy Empire of the Skull quite as much as I found it a little too predictable. Maze of Death, however is a return to form for Philip Caveney. The main characters have now formed a close bond that is believable and laced with humorous banter, and the secondary characters are all well used in the story. The plot is fast-paced and taps into a love that many boys of this age share - ancient Greek mythology, including both the Icarus/Daedalus story and the ever-popular legend of Minotaur. in its labyrinth (the maze of death of the book's title).

Philip Caveney is an author who knows what appeals to young boys and in Maze of Death he certainly delivers. As I mentioned in my recent review for Return to the Lost World, the 1920s is a great era in which to base an adventure story, before the advent of the micro-chip and silly gadgets, and the hero has to rely solely on his wits and the everyday items around him, and this time period is perfect for this story as well. I do have one small moan however - Alec is now two years older than he was in the first book, and there were many moments where I felt his character had not matured enough since The Eye of the Serpent, especially considering the harrowing near-death experiences he has faced since then. With this in mind, as he is about to enter University, I am left wondering whether another book in the series will work or has the series already come to a natureal end?

My thanks go to the publisher for sending me a copy to review, all three books in the series are in print and should be available in all good book shops.

Review: Slime Squad by Steve Cole

Mad scientist Godfrey Gunk had a dream - a dream of creating a whole safari park of monsters on an old rubbish dump. It didn't work. Little did Godfrey know that after he left the rubbish dump, his dream came true ...Meet the inhabitants of Trashland, a whole world full of different types of slimy monsters who all live peacefully alongside each other - at least until now ...Plog keeps himself to himself on account of his very slimy, very stinky feet, so he is surprised one day when Trashland's superhero Slime Squad with their different slimy special powers turn up at his sewer door and bundle him back to their secret operations base. Things are changing in the rubbish dump, mean and nasty slime monsters have grown and are starting to shatter the peace with their evil crimes. The Slime Squad need some help, and they think Plog is the monster to offer it! It's time to fight crime with slime!

Random House describe Steve Cole as a one-man publishing team, and I would suggest that this is a pretty accurate description. This man (or is he a machine?) is possibly this country's most prolific children's author of the moment - this year alone he is scheduled to have more than 25 titles published by Random House. On hearing something like this I would imagine that the cynical grumpy-types out there might start to question the quality of these books (usually without having read a single word), but they would be so very long. This is the man who has so far brought us the Astrosaur series, the Cows In Action series, and now the Slime Squad series - every one of them a fun and hilarious read for the 7+ age group. I know boys younger than this who have these read to them at bedtime, usually in fits of giggles. Steve Cole really knows what makes kids laugh!

Whereas the Astrosaur series utilised the classic boy favourites of science fiction and dinosaurs to appeal to its readers, the Slime Squad series relies on a subject that also has great boy-appeal, namely all things dirty and slimy. The story is set in Trashland, an old rubbish dump that was established by a mad scientist who was so concerned about the increasing amounts of pollution building up in the world that he became determined to create "marvellous mutant mini-monsters out of chemical goo - monsters who would clean up the planet by eating, drinking and generally devouring all types of rubbish". Unfortunately all of his experiments failed, and once his funds and dwindled he gave up, smashing his computer and spreading some of it components across the site in his frustration.

Little did Godfrey Gunk realise that years before he bought his landfill site a consignment of radioactive waste had been buried there, and once he departed it wasn't long before the radiation from this waste began to react with the remains of his experiments and life began to form - hundreds of mini-monsters. This life evolved and soon Trashland became a thriving metropolis, including banks, shops, museums and so on, all situated in areas such as the Tin Can Mountains, Broken Furniture Valley and Spare Part Canyon.

At the same time as all this was happening the remains of the crazy prof's computer was also at work - it had been programmed to repair itself and its artificial intelligence evolved over time to become PIE, short for Perfect Intelligence Electronics. PIE is now the Trashland equivalent of Charlie, with the Slime Squad taking the place of Charlie's Angels - a team of super-powered mini-monsters who, thanks to PIE's all-seeing components, always seem to be in the right place at the right time to lend a hand to the needy inhabitants of Trashland. Unfortunately for the Slime Squad, and Trashland in general, some of the really nasty waste has now begun to leak out and evolve itself - in this case into particularly nasty monsters. These monsters are turning to crime, under the guidance of the mysterious and evil Lord Klukk, and so now the Slime Squad must become crime-fighters, a task they seem woefully unprepared for.

Young boys will love these stories. Steve Cole has a wonderful imagination and loves to play around with words - the inhabitants of Trashland watch Smellyvision, their currency is printed on used toilet paper (the smellier the note, the more valuable it is), and Plog, a reclusive mini-monster who unknowingly has a huge part to play in the Slime Squad, has meals such as rat hairs and flies' legs in seagull-poo sauce. Show me a 5-8 year old boy who doesn't find this sort of thing hilarious! The stories stick to his tried and tested (and so far very successful) formula - create funny, memorable characters...... have them working together as a team...... put them into dangerous situations that require them to use their various abilities...... the team overcomes the enemy/danger despite sometimes enormous odds...... and all this is done with a plot that is saturated with sparkling young boy humour throughout.

These really are the sort of books that will get boys of this age interested in books, and as many parents and professionals know, if you hook them at this age quite often they are hooked for life and I have seen this for myself with both of my godsons and their brothers. There aren't a huge number of good books being produced for this age group (aside from Steve Cole's output there are the Horrid Henry books, the Captain Underpants series and Tommy Donbavand's Scream Street series are the only ones that spring immediately to mind), so I can only hope that Mr Cole doesn't burn out from his massive efforts. I certainly feel that he has a big part to play in creating the older boy readers of the future.

So far two Slime Squad books have been published and are available to buy right now - The Slime Squad vs The Fearsome Fists and The Slime Squad vs The Toxic Teeth, and there are two more scheduled for August 2010.

Review: Mission Survival: Tracks of the Tiger by Bear Grylls

Volcano eruption! Beck and his friend are on a relaxing holiday in Sumatra, visiting orang-utan sanctuaries and hanging out by the pool. Except that when they spend the afternoon out in the jungle, things take an unexpected turn, and a volcano eruption leaves them stranded and alone. Beck must use all his skills to survive the dangers of the jungles and swamps of Sumatra - can he get them to safety alive?

The man with the super-cool name, Bear Grylls, is back with this, his fourth instalment in the Mission Survival series and yet again he has produced an exciting adventure story that will have great appeal to many boy readers. This time Beck and his friend Peter are holidaying on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, an island with a long string of volcanoes that lie on the Pacific's so-called Ring of Fire. Of course, if you have read any of Mr Grylls' books before you will already be able to guess exactly what is going to happen.

Yup - no prizes on offer for predicting that Beck and Peter will become stranded miles from civilization as a result of a volcano eruption, and using the extensive survival skills and knowledge imparted by instructor they will attempt to make their way to safety. The last time the two boys were stranded they were in the Sahara Desert with snakes, scorpions and the merciless sun to contend with. This time there are still snakes, but also included in the equation are crocodiles, a tiger, a cyanide-secreting millipede and bacteria that could quickly cause even minor injuries to become gangrenous.

Bear Grylls' Mission Survival books are all pretty formulaic, and rarely ever particularly deep, although there is a nice environmental subtext running through this story concerning the problems caused by illegal logging in the rain forest. However the majority of 8+ boys are not looking for deep and meaningful, they just want page after page of easy-to-follow action, with characters they can easily relate to. Throw in a bucketful of survival skills that will make them sound cool in front of their mates and these books are a guaranteed hit with this age group (did you know your wee can be used to dissolve the spines of a sea urchin, should you ever be unlucky enough to step on one?). These books are a great introduction to the action/adventure genre before progressing onto the more complicated plots and themes offered by the likes of Robert Muchamore.

Tracks of the Tiger can be read as a stand alone story, although it does occasionally reference events from other books in the series. It is published by Red Fox and is available in stores right now, and my thanks go to Random House for sending me a copy. If you like these books then I also strongly recommend the Alpha Force series by Chris Ryan, also published by Red Fox.