Bumpfizzle the Best on Planet Earth, Reviewed

This story was about this alien named Bumpfizzle, who was sent to Earth on a mission to learn more about it, and everyone thought he was a normal boy.

He lived with a family in a house somewhere on Earth – it didn’t say where, but I think it was in America – and they think he was born 10 years ago, but he is actually an alien, but they don’t realise that.

At the beginning of the book, he is already on Earth, and he is writing letters, and you learn that he was sent by another alien, and he thinks he is on a mission. He is supposed to go around trying to see what things taste like, so he has to try and eat people, and eat cows, and eat kids.

And then after he tasted them, he said to the alien who sent him that they didn’t taste nice, and that alien said Bumpfizzle was going to get fired, but that was a trick, and then he said everyone was going to come down and eat them, but that didn’t happen though.

It was a bit confusing why, but it just didn’t happen. Some parts of this book were really confusing. It went from one part to another and just sort of jumped around a lot between different sections. It was kind of hard to keep track of what was going on.

But the book was funny. It was very funny. There weren’t jokes, but it just made me laugh. There was this little kid – a baby – who hated the alien Bumpfizzle, he was trying to get rid of him at one stage. Every time Bumpfizzle was writing letters back to his boss on Planet Plonk, he was complaining about the baby.

People who like books with cartoons, and who read Roald Dahl would probably like this book. If I had to describe it in three words, I would say: “aliens”, “funny”, “funky” … and “surprising”. I’d recommend it to my friend Brooke. You don’t know her.

Bumpfizzle the Best on Planet Earth by Patricia Forde (Dublin: Little Island, 2018).