Trixie Series

Trixie is a lovable and mischievous girl who always has a set of tricks up her sleeve.  Nothing makes her happier than making her friends laugh.  She doesn’t mean to get into trouble, she just can’t seem to help it!

The Trixie series consists of Trixie 1 & 2 and each book is divided into three different tricks Trixie thinks up. In Trixie 1 there’s The Sneezing Powder Trick, The Stink Bomb Trick and The Gobbler Trick. In Trixie 2, The Whispering Trick, The Toothpaste Trick and The Plastic Insect Trick. The tricks are genuinely funny and even though her laughs usually come at the expense of her long suffering teacher Miss Luna Tick, there’s a sense of playful naughtiness rather than meanness.  The puns and word play on names make reading aloud lots of fun. 

Naughty Children Rule

The genre of books about badly behaving children is hugely successful for a reason.  Children love reading about other children being naughty. Think Horrid Henry, Junie B Jones, Captain Underpants, The Treehouse series, Bean in Ivy & Bean, Roald Dahl books, and more. The children are often rude, impulsive and not scared to back-chat adults. Naughtiness and rule breaking are fun! 

These books allow children to express their own inner rebel. It’s a safe way of being vicariously naughty and doesn’t mean your child is going to copy them. If you are worried, read the book with them and talk about how that couldn’t happen in real life, but it’s very entertaining. Think how grown ups love heist movies where the heroes rob banks or get away with subversive or bad behaviour.  So much of life is controlled – we need to let our hair down sometimes.  So do kids. 

In today’s PC times Trixie is a little anti-hero as she nicknames the class nerd Barry Schmelly (he’s the teacher’s pet), terrorises the teachers and tells scary stories at a camp sleepover.

Of course most of the characters seem to deserve this treatment. Her teacher, Miss Luna Tick at Mizzery Primary seems to secretly – or openly – dislike all children. She sees them as smelly, naughty and irritating. She has rules against joking, laughing or smiling in class.  Even blowing your nose is not allowed! This hilarious sense of over the top, tongue-in-cheek behaviour is a hit with the kids. 

At heart, Trixie is a little girl who loves making peoople happy and laughing. Her class mates love her because she always gets them out of work and makes life fun. 

I love the character development in Trixie 2.

Without giving a spoiler, Trixie does mature a bit and learns that working at school might not be such a bad thing after all – as long as she can still play tricks of course!  This may relieve those parents who fear she is a bad role model. You really shouldn’t though – for all the reasons above. 

Lori-Ann Preston’s other best selling series is Thabo The Space Dude. Read our interview with her here.