THE PIG SCROLLS
By Paul Shipton
Puffin, £9.99; 224pp
ISBN 0 141 38021 7
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HELPING HERCULES
By Francesca Simon
Orion, £5.99; 128pp
ISBN 1 842 55153 1

Whenever parents and teachers get into a state about boys not reading, I want to march the recalcitrants down to the nearest bookshop and show them ranks of enthralling tales begging to be bought. The trouble is, if you’ve raced through J. K. Rowling, Anthony Horowitz and Eva Ibbotson there isn’t all that much left to turn them into fully-fledged readers. So Paul Shipton’s The Pig Scrolls deserves three squeals of delight: one for filling this gap, two for gloriously subverting Key Stage 2 history and a third for being the most inspired comedy to come along since the Artemis Fowl series.

Gryllus, the hero, is one of Odysseus’ men who, turned into a pig by the enchantress Circe, decided to stay that way. Wallowing about with his snout in the trough (or, more accurately, the woods of Ancient Greece), living high on the hog, he is alarmed to be captured, sold and told by a Sibyl that he has to save the world. Not being keen on the tense, nervous headache that accompanies acts of war, he naturally makes a bolt for it. Destiny won’t let him be, however, and before you can say “pork chop”, Gryllus is fighting off ravening chimeras. Burdened with the company of Sybil, the young Homer and a halfwit called Bumscruff who develops strange powers, Gryllus himself is, as Sibyl says, “not exactly the quickest chariot in the race”. Yet he manages to do surprisingly well on his journey. A tetchy inventor shows him the uses of an electromagnet when dealing with the iron-beaked Stymphalian birds, and Gryllus, by an act of inspired stupidity, outwits the Sphinx. Meanwhile, the end of the world creeps closer.

Reinventing the classics is a hit and myth business, but Shipton’s book is a triumph. The jokes crackle like grilled bacon, the plot is juicy and the book will teach your child more about Ancient Greece than a dozen textbooks.

Older children who can cope with more violence will lap up terrific myth-based thrillers such as Alan Gibbons’s Shadow of the Minotaur, but, meanwhile, Francesca Simon’s gloriously funny Helping Hercules has been reissued with sparky new illustrations by Tony Ross. Susan is a bolshy middle child who hates doing homework or chores but who gets a magic coin that transports and transforms her. If you’ve every wondered how a hero as thick as Hercules worked out how to clean the Augean stables or trick Atlas into taking back the sky on to his shoulders, look no further. Susan meddles with every major myth in the canon, from Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to King Midas’s appetite for gold. Snotty, bad-tempered and too clever for her own good, she discovers that she really loves her brother and sister, and might have something to learn. Both books are seriously funny and clever: I can’t imagine a child of 8-plus who wouldn’t get hooked on reading because of them.

Read on

• Greek Myths by Marcia Williams (Walker Books, 5+)
• The Adventures of Odysseus by Neil Philip (Orion, 6+)
• Colossus by Lesley Howarth (OUP, 10+)
• Joshua Cross by Diane Redmond (Wizard Books, 10+)

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