By Neil Binoy
New Delhi, Nov 15, 2019: A door creaked, as a boy climbed down the dusty stairs. He looked around at the horrors around him. He kept walking and suddenly gasped as he got to the center of the crypt. A dust blown stone table stood ominously.
A shiver ran down his spine as he stared, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, at ‘The World’s Worst Teachers.’ He reached over, barely daring to touch the book, filled with ungodly amounts of hell’s spawn. From Frankenstein type monstrosities to egotistic art teachers, this book is payback from the kids of the world.
The contents, of just ten teachers, are enough to make a child cry (I tried it out on my younger sister). The battles between the forces of child and adult are so gruesomely, spine-tearingly, teeth chatteringly wonderment (quoting Walliams: Look it up in your Walliamsictionary!).
The zaniest stories, of a nine-hour wedding, The sea of Tears, a seventeen-hour play, and a school for Poshos. A mad mixture of ten absolutely off-the-rocker teachers, from obsessions with balls, to the Chair of a Thousand Farts, to a giant robot named Marv (Okay, fine, I made the last one up. Humph.).
Walliams has put so much detail into the book, you can almost, very nearly, just maybe, scent The Incredible Bulk’s pong, or Doctor Dread’s disgusting weapons of torture, or maybe the sewage in which a poor teacher, very sadly, gets flushed into. This book was invented for the sole purpose of revenge. Served cold.
If you’ve read Walliams’ books about the World’s Worst Children, you (and the World’s Worst Children) have probably wished to see the same fate befall the worst natural enemy of the child- The Teacher! And so, we behold this glorious book with a greedy, hungry, almost wild gleam in our eyes.
But as you flip your way through the pages, your mad grin gradually turns into a grimace of disgust, horror, and nausea-ness, for The World’s Worst Teachers are much, much worse than you expected. Throngs of horror descend upon you as it slowly dawns that the ordinary, common or garden teacher, might not be so ordinary! Each and every story has enthralled me to the end, with the delightful complement of Walliam’s private, expanding and entirely made up dictionary’s slew of words.
But, a word of caution, for some of these teachers meet a sticky end! (In the case of a sickly, disgusting specimen, a stuck end.) Of the whole lot, only one has a happy(ish) ending. The book has a nice crisp bunch of stories, with a smooth end, and a professional touch that leaves you wanting more and more.
The layout is perfect, and enough thought put in to give the credits as a school report card! In short, the book is great. The illustrations are extremely relishing (Thank you, Mr. Ross!), and made me linger on every page. David Walliams was born with a pen in his hand, scribbling furiously (Too bad he couldn’t write. I bet he’d have come up with a blockbuster!).
To this day, he writes books that enthrall, appall, and to some, amaze. He thinks much along the way of Roald Dahl, out of the box, but limited to kids. In fact, I bet old Roald Dahl would have given up his title willingly, to say the least. This diamond is but a multi-faceted one, being a television personality, as well as acting in films and writing books.
(Neil Binoy is a grade 7 student from Sanskriti school, New Delhi. Neil is an avid reader and blogger. He is passionate about science, dinosaurs, coding and Star Wars. This book review was first published in Hindustan Times newspaper.)