Too Many Tims

If your reviewer were to state that this book is totally bonkers, author Henry White would probably be very pleased, and feel that he had achieved his objective!  

Tim has a hard life: his parents expect him to do lots of chores, including dusting their huge collection of snowglobes, he has to get good grades and be in lots of school clubs, and he has to earn money with a paper round and a Saturday job at the barber’s as well. When he says he wishes there could be 2 of him to share the load, his clever friend Nora reveals her cloning machine, and they create Tim-Two. That does make his life a little easier, but it becomes difficult to hide the fact that there are two of him at home and at school. They have a hilarious fight with a dinner lady, and, just as the 4,267 snow globes are about to be featured in a magazine, the boys bump into each other when cleaning them, and there is a crash…Dad demands he pays a million pounds to replace the collection, and Tim and Tim-Two realise they need more of them to help.

It all gets totally out of hand, of course, and soon there are too many Tims living in a Timocracy, or is it a Timtatorship? By the time they create Timlandia, there are thousands of Tims: Tall-Tim, Moustache-Tim, Fun-Tim, and so on, but Tim-Three is a bit of a rebel, and causes a lot of trouble. Nora explains that all the Tims have aspects of the original Tim’s personality, and Tim-Three is less of a pushover, not necessarily doing whatever his parents and teachers tell him to do… 

Tim is appalled at how it’s all gone so wrong, but Nora, who loves science and inventing machines, has built in a way to put the Tims back together, complete with the memories of each Tim, and eventually they manage to get back to normal. There is a difference though: Tim realises that he can use other traits of his personality to stand up to his parents and live his own life. It’s a terrifically original idea, and the wacky cartoon illustrations by a real Tim, Tim Wesson, make this book a lot of fun to read, not only for people called Tim!