Suddenly everyone's mad about Hunky Parker. People are desperate to buy disgusting Hunky T-shirts, trainers like pigs' trotters, and pig-swill yoghurt. But Dinah hates it all. And when she and her friends try to investigate, they walk straight into the middle of a fiendish plot - and a race against time. Can they stop the Demon Headmaster before it's too late?
* The best-selling series which inspired the top-rating television series * Author with sales of over a million books * Prize-winning author - winner of Smarties Prize, Whitbread Award and Carnegie Medal * Now reissued for the first time as a matching set, with eyecatching fluorescent covers and a sturdy sewn binding. * Gillian Cross lives in Warwickshire.
Gillian Cross was born Gillian Arnold in 1945. She was educated at North London Collegiate School, Somerville College, Oxford and the University of Sussex. Although now a full-time writer who often travels and gives talks in connection with her work, she has had a number of informal jobs including being an assistant to a Member of Parliament. For eight years she also sat on the committee which advises ministers about public libraries.
She is married to Martin Cross and they have four grown-up children, two sons and two daughters.
Third book in the series (I think, or at least the third we've read) and I'm done with it now. There's not a lot here that wasn't in the first two and I think even my kids, who really love a series, might think twice about bothering with number four.
This amazing book by Gillian Cross is amazing.During the story Dinah and her friends are captured by the demon headmaster - now Hunky Parker. After they are captured Dinah manages to escape, destroy the head master's plan's and free her friends from being blown up. When they are captured they are sent to the Sty - a place designed to be a Hunky Parker world. At the end of the story the demon headmaster had escaped but his master minded plan was foiled. I learnt to never tresspass on private property and be caught.
My TA read this to our class in year 3 but she didn't get past like chapter 6 and I remembered some 10 years later that this book existed and I had to know how it ended. I have not read the first two in this series but I'm glad I read this - it was a good time. I mean I'm obviously not the target audience but it was fun.
I adored The Demon Headmaster book and must have read it a dozen times as a child. I also had a copy of the sequel, The Prime-Minister’s Brain which I read multiple times. Somehow the other books passed me by, so when I saw a copy of the third book at the school, I thought I’d give it a go. I read it on a forty minute train ride and it was an extremely exciting forty minutes.
I loved the central plot revolving around the hideous character of Hunky, the pig that causes extreme and violent dedication. While the book was about the insidious way this hideous mascot takes over the main character’s lives, it was utterly thrilling (even for an adult reading a children’s book). However, once we get to the evil lair, with the huge snowstorm and armies of zombified holiday-goers, things became too kiddy and cartoony to be as gripping, though it was good old-fashioned fun.
I loved the Demon Headmaster as a child, but it wasn't until I was in my teens that I read the later ones, which seemed to have been produced primarily to sell the TV show (or vice-versa). This installment is pretty relevant today, with its obsession with a TV show being the focus of the plot, but I still think The Prime Minister's Brain was the best one!