Literally Hilarious! Families Gone Wild

Literally Hilarious! Families Gone Wild by Just Write For Kids Australia and Friends (Daisy Lane Publishing), RRP $17.99 Junior Fiction ISBN 9-781763-670082

Reviewed by Susan Hancy

Opening my beautifully gift-wrapped copy of Literally Hilarious! Families Gone Wild was truly like receiving a box of chocolates. I expected a collection of funny junior-fiction short stories: the book certainly had those, but it also included nuggets of poems, limericks, quizzes, and jokes interspersed between the wacky tales. It even had a couple of pages where my daughter could draw her own take on kooky family portraits! At just 1000 words per story, in large type with fun illustrations, it was the perfect book for my son to whiz through his bedtime reading obligations and still get a laugh.

From serving spaghetti on a hoverboard under flashing disco lights, to hurdling fences to escape a raging bull, to playing hockey with scones gone wrong, the delightfully ludicrous stories kept us guessing with every page turn. The pirate limericks gave me a great incentive to search online for more limericks, which led my kids to make up their own. Verse such as:

“At breakfast Tommy spilled his milk, and dipped his toast in juice,

He licked his sister’s scrambled eggs when she called him a goose”

took me back to my childhood, reading Spike Milligan and searching my bookshelf for my dog-eared copy of Silly Verse for Kids. And despite Literally Hilarious! being made-up stories for kids, I found myself as the real-life parent in the story “Nothing in Particular,” with the too-true everyday experience of serving up scrambled nothings and packing lunchboxes full of nothingness.

Overall, this book shouldn't be exclusive to junior fiction readers; older kids and adults who enjoy ridiculousness and a healthy dose of chuckles should enjoy it too.