The Baddies are mean and the baddies are scary and the baddies just love to be bad. When a little girl moves into a cottage, the Baddies – a troll, a witch and a ghost – decide to give her a fright. However, she turns out to be rather braver than they think. After failing entirely to scare her, the baddies are challenged to a contest by a mouse. If they are so bad, he says, then they should be able at least to steal the girl’s handkerchief …
The Baddies returns to the subversiveness and light-heard humour of The Gruffalo. What the little mouse understands, that the Baddies don’t, is that the best way to get what you want out of other people isn’t always to scare them. The cunning mouse is descended from the mouse of The Gruffalo – they are made out of the same material. The book also brings together all the Donaldson and Scheffler do best. There’s a fairytale setting, some not so bright baddies, a bold woodland creature and a cat with grade A cattitude. The story is told in rhyme that doesn’t once feel forced or irritating (something that Donaldson is master of and very few picture book authors successfully imitate).
There is a pantomime quality to this story that will leave young readers cheering on their favourite characters and calling out warnings to the girl at the centre of the story. It is lovely that this has come out just in time for Halloween because it captures everything very young children love about the holiday (fun and games and costumes … and no real scares).
Donaldson and Scheffler are superstars of the children’s publishing world and rightly so. They are a dream partnership where the style of one creative enhances the other’s, making the final product more than the sum of two parts. Their books have an alchemical quality where the mixture of the pictures and text comes together to create something magical.
A troll, a witch, a ghost and a girl in a spooky old cottage at the edge of the wood. The perfect book for Halloween and a fairytale that will win readers over all year around.
The Baddies by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler is available now from Scholastic. RRP. £12.99
