Readers in Year 5 and above who enjoyed the barkingly mad world of Awful End, Philip Ardagh’s first book about Eddie Dickens, a boy who attracts strange characters and even stranger adventures, will not be disappointed by the sequel.
Once again, the humour is not solely dependent upon a cast of eccentrics - summarised in a dramatis personae teasingly placed on page 74 of this middle book in the proposed trilogy, and quirkily depicted by the illustrator David Roberts - but hinges more often than not on Ardagh’s playful pose as an omniscient narrator.
The “all-knowing narrator” apologises at one point for not anticipating a stern man’s cry for silence, and advances intimacy with the reader by adding in parenthesis, after mentioning the fluff found in tummy buttons:
“Don’t think I don’t know about these things.”
MICHAEL THORN
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