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Tuesday, 30 August 2022

Wild & Wacky Adventurers

Wild & Wacky Adventurers by Dianne Bates and Bill Condon, illustrated by Cherie Dignam (IP Kidz) PB RRP $16.00 ISBN: 9781922332943

Reviewed by Dannielle Viera

This first book of the Wild & Wacky Adventurers series contains two uproarious junior fiction stories broken up into fast-paced chapters. The start of each chapter features a small but side-splitting illustration by Cherie Dignam that perfectly reflects the entertaining essence of the section.

In ‘Tazzie Wallaroo & The Perfect Match’, Tazzie and her team of Cha-Wow-Wow dogs brave the ‘ravenous, repulsive’ Hairybeary, ‘chittering, chattering ice mice monsters’ and a ‘beastly blowhard blizzard’ on their way to capturing the Abominable Snowman – who’s not as mean and smelly as he’s been made out to be.

In ‘Kylie O’Riley & The Watta-Wopping Volcano’, volcanologist Kylie must find an old dude called Rudy who has fallen into a caldera. She hypnotises a gnarly dragon, avoids being a cannibal’s chow and speeds across no man’s land (‘it was a good thing she was a girl’) to the base of Watta-Wopping Volcano, but is she skilled enough to save the singed but still very much alive Rudy?

Dianne Bates and Bill Condon offer up two tasty servings of silliness in bite-size form. Kids aged six to nine will quickly eat up the eccentricity and exploits and be eager for the next chortle-worthy course. Each story has a rich filling – thanks to themes of courage, acceptance, tenacity, and resilience – but there are puns a-plenty to keep the text light and fluffy.

Ideal for reluctant readers, Wild & Wacky Adventurers makes reading scrumptiously fun. Youngsters will be so caught up in the action that they won’t realise they’ve gobbled up the whole book until they see the two saddest words in English literature: ‘The End’.

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