Fowl Pest

An extremely meandering story about Amy Picket, who wants to be a chicken, and the convulsions endured by her family, friends and school when her father's purchase of a trio of fowls suddenly makes her ambitions realisable. Amy learns chick-speak, and her subsequent actions convince everybody that her eccentricity has intensified into madness. The great joy of this book is not so much the wacky storyline (though the climax is brilliantly bizarre) as the relentless and cleverly silly wordplay for which it's a vehicle. Scarcely a paragraph passes without some felicitous flight of linguistic fancy, even if it's only at the level of 'How do you stop a cow from charging?' 'Take away its credit card.' A good story, and a great book for developing enjoyment of language.