‘A barque from hell. Spuds on the roof. A visit from police. It was war.’

Good morning/ Good afternoon teachers and class, I will share with you a fictional/fantasy novel “The Cabbage Patch War” by Paul Jennings.

It is a story about a man who eats dinner with his family one day. The father in this book starts by shoving food down his mouth because he is always hungry. Not only this, but we can see from the illustration (pictures)throughout Paul Jennings’ book, that he is fat and really, really likes his food and we can see that after the food he felt sick.(Points to the image) and ran outside to vomit everything in his cabbage patch garden.

The funny thing is, the day there was a baby cabbage. He watered it every day and within a month it grew to a huge size. He didn’t feel like a failure anymore. Until the beginning of war.

One afternoon he decided to have a barbecue and not invite his neighbour Whacka because it was only for the cricket club. Whacka got angry since the music was too loud, he decided to start a fire so that no one could see anything. They grew annoyed at each other so they told each other off. Then they got into a huge fight because dad didn’t invite Whacka to the barbecue, so they made a contest to see who loses the most weight, whoever loses the contest has to move houses.

So what happens in the end? Well that is for me to know and you to find out when you read this!

Now, this book cover’s illustration is related to the novel and it demonstrates how the characters are fighting during a barbecue. We can see that a barbecue goes wrong because there’s food going everywhere, water splashing everywhere. This creates chaos and is also shown through the expression of the characters when they are ducking, screaming and also panicking.

The capital letters on the cover also highlights more chaos. We can see it is crowded like you need to escape (show the back of the book). People do escape if we look at the back of the novel, we can see more characters running away. It also has the blurb in red writing on an angle demonstrating how things are not normal.

This novel should be read by people who enjoy reading fictional books. I encourage that readers at the age of 8 to 10 should read this book and I gave you many reasons to do so. So guys, come on read this book!