Mr Gum and the Power Crystals

There’s always a risk involved in churning out a series of titles, particularly ones that rely on a particularly unique sense of the bizarre. Will we end up with the same old thing? Will the formula turn stale?

Power Crystals brings us to book four in the Mr Gum series – and there’s no sign of tiredness. While reading the fourth involves a certain amount of happy familiarity with the characters and the style in which the story is told, Stanton has managed to inject enough humour to make this title equally as funny as its predecessors.

The story, not that it matters too much, involves the villain trying to re-start a deadly windmill, but it’s the games played with the reader that give these titles their unique quality. Children will love the anarchy of the mid section where the story stalls and we are continually turning pages convinced it will start again, only to find Stanton is daring enough to keep the joke going. Jokes are what the Gum books are all about and, like the books that preceded it, Power Crystals takes the conventions of storytelling and plays games with them. If the stories can stay as fresh as this, then I’m waiting for book five.