The Tinklers Three: Books 1-3 (M C Badger, illus by Leigh Brown, Hardie Grant Egmont)
It’s always exciting to see a new junior fiction series enter the bookshop. Meredith Badger’s ‘The Tinklers Three’ series launches with three books for five- to eight-year-olds about the three Tinkler children, who live by themselves while their parents are away working in the circus. The genre of the child alone (and, less commonly, children alone) is a familiar one, rich with possibilities. The Tinkler children are interesting individuals: Mila, the eldest, always has good (and sometimes not so good) ideas; Marcus, in the middle, is an inventor with a fair dose of practicality; and Turtle, the youngest, rather endearingly thinks she is a turtle. There is a loose support system in the background: Mrs Fitz, who seems to play at being a strict old lady and keeps a very lenient eye over the children, and the bakers, who keep the children supplied with cakes and buns. The Splatley family, who also live in the building, are a perfect foil for the Tinklers, being as mean-spirited as the Tinklers are fun and inventive.
In the first book in the series, A Very Good Idea, the Tinklers decide to cross the town without touching the ground. Definitely the most imaginative of the three books, it ends in spectacular fashion, with the city’s pigeons becoming one bird and carrying the children to the clock tower at the end of their mission. In the second book, An Excellent Invention, the Tinklers visit school for a day by way of a motorised bed that Marcus has invented. As the children have previously been taught by clowns at circus school, ordinary school doesn’t have much to offer, and they decide to call it a day. In the third book, The Coolest Pool, the Tinklers are banned from the local pool, so Mila creates their own pool by flooding their apartment. The awful Splatley children get their comeuppance again in this book, and it’s the only time the Tinklers act meanly, which I think weakens the book. Although the third book is as much fun (and certainly as anarchic) as the others, it lacks the same good-natured resolution.
One of the strengths of the series is Badger’s use of interesting language. The books are also well-structured—they are proper chapter books, not just a story chopped into chapter portions. The circus references throughout the texts are an amusing addition; for example, the children only pay for one seat on the bus, so they sit in circus fashion—one on top of the other—and never leave the same way they come in (surely a clown rule). The books are full of energy and good ideas, and Leigh Brown’s illustrations both match and extend the text.
Louise Pfanner is an author, illustrator and bookseller
Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Category: Reviews
