If the goal of this short YA novel was to give pre-teens a good reason to flush their toilets, then I'm not sure J. J. Nikitin was particularly successful. I think she may have accidentally given them good reasons to deliberately not flush and then hang around in their locked bathrooms so that Captain Flatus Codswallop can emerge from their toilets and whisk them away to a new life working on his pirate ship, the Scumbucket, as one of his soiled crew of sewer pirates.

If that sounds like icky toilet humour to you, you'd be absolutely right, because this is one book I'm happy didn't arrive accompanied by a scratch-n-sniff card, but it's family-friendly toilet humour. It may be that the best way to read this book is aloud to cringing but grinning ten-year-olds, just not as a bedtime story, because they're not going to want to pause to sleep. In fact, they're more likely to pause for a bathroom break and then we're back to losing them to Capt. Codswallop.

The primary ten-year-old we meet here is Lucas Goodspeed, who's a typical ten-year-old boy in that bodily functions are objects of humour. There's a fantastic scene to open up the novel in which he's kicked out of a maths test at school because the double-bean burritos he had for lunch simply must make their presence known. Yes, we begin with what amounts to a chapter-long fart joke and that seems entirely appropriate given the noxious depths to which this novel will gleefully take us.

Lucas absolutely knows that he should flush the toilet after he uses it, not just because he's been asked to, but because his dad is a plumber who's extra keen to drum it into his head that not doing so means that he'll be whisked away through the pipes by the sewer pirates. Foolishly, Lucas does not take this advice seriously. Needless to say, he finds himself face–to-face with Capt. Codswallop, who steals him into a whole new world, one where you can fart all you like, because it'll smell much better than the surrounding atmosphere.

I'm not sure how this logic works, because my pipes certainly aren't wide enough to accommodate a ten-year-old boy, let alone a six-foot-tall pirate, but this is hardly a work of realism. Nikitin wisely has us suspend our disbelief pretty quickly, so she can get done to the serious business of building a fantastic hidden world far below our feet that's full of quirky characters who will surely keep us engaged even if we're forty years older than the intended target audience. It's also hardly a long book, so I devoured it in a couple of late night sessions, which I fully realise should have been a few days sitting on the pot.

If you can get past the icky setting—you can imagine what Lucas must smell like, post-descent into the sewers through an unflushed toilet, and you're sane enough to suspend disbelief in a fantasy written for middle-grade kids—this is a heck of a lot of fun. The worst aspect is probably the way in which we soon realise that the author had to have built a checklist of bathroom-related objects to shoehorn into her worldbuilding, something that ten-year-olds are absolutely not going to notice, and the best aspect is probably the way in which we really don't care either.

After all, this is about a frickin' pirate ship sailing the cruddy waters of our sewer system, that the captain and his crew of ne'erdowell children have furnished with whatever they can steal from the bathrooms of the land. Codswallop's cabin is full of that, from the U shaped rugs on the floor to an array of nondescript art on the walls. Of course his chair is a toilet. What did you expect? But there is imagination at play here. What flag do you think they fly on the Scumbucket? That's right, it's a Jolly Plunger! Early on, I had sinking feelings about the next revelation but, the longer this ran on, the more I started to anticipate them and grin at the ones I'd missed. For instance, what would be the food served up on a sewer pirate ship? Let's see if you can figure that one out.

Lucas is initially appalled at his treatment on the Scumbucket, because he doesn't have a notably positive attitude towards authority figures, but he soon learns that it's not all bad and there are even benefits to not going to school and being forced to succumb to societal norms. However, this isn't quite Neverland and Lucas wants to go home. However, after things escalate during a trip to a schoolfriend's bathroom to steal her grandmother's denture glue—the best thing to patch hulls of sewer pirate ships, don't you know—he finds himself caught in the middle of a time-honoured war, between sewer pirates and their deadliest enemies: plumbers like Lucas's dad, Carl Goodspeed.

It really ought to be easy to dismiss this as a cheap attempt to exploit the ickiness of pre-teen boys but it's a surprisingly deep novel. No, it's not going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Lucas has quite the story arc here, growing as a character in ways you would expect from a more serious children's novel. Unlikely as it may sound, I wanted to keep reading after the final page, to find out what he gets up to next, both at school with Tabitha and at home with his dad.

I could easily see an immediate sequel, albeit one that takes a completely different tone as these kids mature and lose all memory of their adventures here along with other childish beliefs, and a later more thematically consistent one set after Lucas joins Viking Plumbing and has to remember again in order to save his dad, who's been kidnapped by the sewer pirates. It doesn't seem that Nikitin has gone there yet, but I don't see why she shouldn't. Everyone spends time in the bathroom. Why not take a notepad and write a book while you're otherwise occupied? ~~ Hal C F Astell