86 Books Like Little Badman and the Invasion of the Killer Aunties

What all of Joanna Nadin’s books have in common is her ability to capture the voice of her characters so perfectly they feel truly alive. The children of class 4B have that loveable lunacy I remember from teaching kids this age. That authenticity is what has kids falling off their chairs with laughter, and what makes this such a great book to read aloud. You’ll find yourself repeating catchphrases later. Rikin Parekh’s illustrations add another layer of brilliance and perfectly capture the characters and their comedy antics. Literally hilarious!

“Dad says well at least I haven’t been arrested. Grandpa says being arrested would be getting off lightly and in his day he had to walk five miles to school barefoot and eat gravel for lunch. 

Mum who works at the council says, ‘I have spent all day listening to Mr. Butterworth bang on about bollards and the last thing I… show more.

This book is jam-packed with hilarious details and a narrator who loves to share jokes directly with the reader. The laughs come consistently and quickly, and as someone who knows how hard that is to achieve, I read with respect!

Mort the Meek’s role as the only vegetarian pacifist in the violent kingdom of Brutalia is comedy genius. Keeping his vow to live peacefully, without hurting anyone, becomes a challenge when the evil Queen appoints him Royal Executioner and his first job is to execute his best friend. Fantastic fun, fantastically illustrated, with enough gore to satisfy readers who love yelling ‘Urgh, gross!’ between their giggles.

“The ravens circled Brutalia, searching the ragged shoreline for distressed sailors. Or at least some body parts of distressed sailors. A plump eyeball was always nice.

Beware the ravens of Brutalia! said no one. Because no one ever survived to pass on the message.”

I’ve been a huge fan of Swapna and Sheena’s since I first read Dave Pigeon, which is so good it’s now a set text on the Creative Writing degree I teach. These two are champions of slapstick, silliness, and subversive creatures with big hearts. And Bad Panda is, arguably, their greatest creation. She’s SO desperate to be bad, but she is scuppered at every turn by the fact that everything she does looks so ridiculously cute. The result is panda-monium (groan!)

“Are you sick of being utterly adorable?
Tired of being cuddled and hugged?
Fed up of having your head confused for your bottom because you just so happen to be SOOOOPER-DOOOOOPER fluffy?
Lin: If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you’re in the right book.”

I want to live inside Ross Montgomery’s head. It seems full of magical people and places, including a school janitor’s room filled with huge feuding civilizations! The story hops masterfully from the school janitor to the tyrannical Headmaster to the story’s brilliant ten-year-old protagonist Max, without missing a beat. Max is deaf, which doesn’t need to be an issue, if people can just make a few small accommodations to help him fit in. But, instead, the horrible Head treats him like some kind of strange school mascot, constantly singling him out for special attention.

Max and the Millions seamlessly combines action, mystery, struggles with hearing aids, and a warning about the abuse of power. All with a sense of the surreal that will have you sniggering throughout.

“Max was hiding in a cupboard
He usually hid in the toilets, but they’d all exploded that morning – again – and Mr.… show more.

I absolutely fell in love with this book when I read it to my kids as a bedtime story. The plot is smart and pacey, and the writing jumps off the page.

Andy Jones strikes a fantastic balance between laugh-out-loud comedy and creepy, child-friendly horror in this time-hopping adventure, which is anchored by a trio of really likeable characters. 

I remember binging Bond movies with my brother as a boy. In the early eighties, the glorious days of VCR tapes, the first big-screen TVs, with not a cell phone in sight. I’ve seen them all now, and as an author myself and a reader all my life, I’ve read every one as well. All of Fleming’s originals plus ten or twelve of the newer ones. Those are good, too, and more modern. You’ll see what I mean in a moment.

As usual, the book is better than the movie, but very different, and not just in terms of plot. The first glimpse of action occurs at the 57% mark. The pace does quicken after that, leading to an exciting finale, yet this is a work of art, a piece of literary fiction with carefully crafted passages meant to be read twice, not a macho romp with explosions and violence… show more.

This one’s my go-to fantasy world when I feel middle-aged. Bett runs a mysterious team whose skills include hacking, guns, gadgets, and flying helicopters. When scientist Ross Fleming disappears from his arms research job, Bett calls in the person he knows will do anything to save Ross: his mother, bored housewife Jane Fleming who dreams of adventure. Leaving a trail of broken laws behind her, she gets herself illegally into France to join Bett, where her dreams start coming true: a sports car, a transmitter disguised as an earring, a casino, and a gun she now knows how to fire...  and it’s all narrated with Brookmyre’s trademark humour.

Dr. No was the sixth James Bond novel Fleming wrote but it was the first one I was finally able to read in paperback when I was about twelve years old.

It transfixed me. I had never read anything quite like it, transporting a boy trapped in small-town Ontario into a wider world of sophistication, sex, and violence.

I devoured the other Bond adventures as fast as I could get my hands on them. If any books made me hunger for faraway glamorous places, it was the Bond novels.

If you can’t imagine the influence Fleming’s worldly writing had on me, you have only to read one of the Priscilla Tempest mysteries.

This is the latest in a series that is a clever parody of the James Bond series of books by Ian Fleming. 

Haris Orkin is an excellent writer who has built this series around his charming protagonist, James Flynn, who you cannot tell if he is crazy or has the deepest and most brilliant cover story imaginable – a patient in a psychiatric hospital.

While it is told with a tongue firmly planted in cheek, there is plenty of real action and adventure. It is a great escape from the mundane everyday life.     

A man is sent to visit a mysterious count in his secluded mountaintop fortress, where a diabolical plot unfolds, involving an attack on England using his Angels of Death, women under his hypnotic command. The man finds himself slowly becoming a prisoner, leading to his planning an escape and a race to stop the Count’s plot from unfolding.

Sound familiar? It is, essentially, the plot of Dracula. It is also the plot of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the tenth James Bond novel. If Count Dracula is the king of vampires, then James Bond is inarguably the king of spies.