At first I thought this book would be a bit like The Borrowers, with small people going around "misplacing" things. It is actually about a family of Meddlers (or Pranksters) called the Odds, and Meddlers are "about as tall as a medium-sized garden gate".
At first the Odds played tricks on each other before they going off on their separate ways to play individual pranks individually, e.g. the children Edgar and Elsie playing tricks at their school, before reconvening. That is the first half of the book and it felt a lot like Monty Python and the Holy Grail in its structure up to here without much of a plot and just things happening very separately. Then the second half had them come back together because Mr Odd had discovered that the Plopwells of Snootypants Manor were plotting to bulldoze the Odds street to replace it with a supermarket. This meant that instead of pranking separately and against each other they would need to work (or prank) together to get the Plopwells to stop, but whatever pranks they pulled just didn't seem to work. Things then come to a head in the chapter "To prank the unprankable foe".
There are drawings throughout the book to accompany the text, a map of the town Trott at the beginning, and a multiple-choice set of questions at the end to determine how much of a meddler you are. I read it with my 6-year-old daughter. Her favourite bits were the map, the questionnaire, and some of the bits that made her chuckle in the story, but overall she wasn't too interested which makes me think that with all the pranking going on this book would be better suited for boys.
(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed here.)
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| The Odds will return in "The Odds Strike Back!" |
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