Second Childhood

It's a joy to find each Gleitzman book - he's so funny about serious things. Here, Mark and his friends are having trouble researching the life of a famous person until they discover that they were, in previous lives, Henry Ford, Queen Victoria, Einstein and ... a famous racehorse. Then they realise they've been responsible for some of the world's major problems and set out to make amends: Japanese tourists are ushered into a demolition site to square thing up about the Atom bomb and, in a tremendous climax, they appear in the centre of town with the stolen, stuffed version of the racehorse: 'it's not fair that when we were stuffing the planet up we were heroes and now we want to fix it up we're just kids'.