Dungzilla (James Foley, Fremantle Press)

Sally Tinker is an inventor—the world’s foremost inventor under the age of 11, to be precise—and her latest invention is a doozy. The Resizenator can shrink anything to microscopic size or make it grow to gigantic proportions. But when Sally and her friend Charli fire it up for a test run, not everything goes smoothly: Charli’s pet dung beetle gets in the way, and the monstrous Dungzilla is created. Can the budding young scientists shrink Douglas the dung beetle back down to size before they’re crushed beneath a giant ball of poo? What a lot of fun James Foley’s book is! Told in a highly graphic style through illustrated panels, this is a genuinely funny story that’s also packed full of knowledge. Beginner readers aged six to eight will not only laugh themselves stupid at the plethora of poo jokes, they’ll also learn a lot about insects and biology. The style and content is perfect for fans of Aaron Blabey’s ‘Bad Guys’ series, and while this is the second book in a series, readers won’t have to have read the first—Brobot—to follow along, although they’ll definitely want to.

Holly Harper is a children’s bookseller at Readings Kids

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