Wheelnuts! Craziest Race on Earth - #2 - Spooky Smackdown product reviews

In the past my daughter has enjoyed other Knife and Packer stories. While they haven't been my favourite, she gets a kick out of them. So I was happy to get this one and see if Wheelnuts was for us. I should note here that she has not been car-mad for some years, though we do make her watch Top Gear.

As soon as I started reading, she was hooked. I realised that she was leaning right in to see the pictures and was stopping me to talk about the illustrations. She cuddled right to me, and we discussed each page of pictures. The pictures are really striking. Everything is in such vivid cartoon colour, you can't help but look. The only issue I had was that sometimes the fonts were hard to read against the colour of the page. This only bothered me for two pages that I remember though.

My eldest thought some of the creatures that the racers encounter were very cute, and she favourites were the bats and the trees in the forest. She was a bit horrified at what the racers were doing a couple of times, as she is a bit of an eco warrior. But we were able to talk about it just being a story.

The book took us 3 evenings to read and she kept begging for one more chapter each night. That's a sure sign that the book is being very well received. When we finished it tonight, she was visibly disappointed it was over and asked if we could get any more. So I think we'll be putting our hands up for more. This is awesome since it is not something I would have requested otherwise.

My son loved the first book in the Wheelnuts series and while I had my reservations about it, he begged me for the second book and was super excited when we recieved it to review.

Wheelnuts is a fast paced, action packed car race. In this book, the Spooky Smack Down, the racers are faced with ghosts, haunted castles, vampire bats and even a dragon.

My son (age7) was mesmerised from the get go. He loves cars and all things spooky so this book was right up his alley. The book is full of quirky cars and even quirkier characters which had us laughing out loud at times. Even though it's a very competitive race, there is also the theme of teamwork where all the racers work together to clear a particularly difficult obstacle and of course the book isn't complete without a bad guy.

We read this book over a couple of nights and it was one of those books where my son kept begging me for 'just one more chapter'. It's action packed with no boring bits and the interesting mix of characters makes this book suitable for both boys and girls. The illustrations are colourful and engaging for younger readers.

I felt as though there was something missing from the first book and this book hasn't changed my mind but it works for its intended audience so I can't argue with that. We can't wait for the third instalment.